Set building completion and filming

Last week we filmed the sequence within our fully built set after putting some final touches to the decoration of it. This was a learning experience as the process was completely new to us, however it was enjoyable and I think as a group we were productive in terms of the time and resources made available to us within the final accessible day to the studio.

We had decided as a group beforehand to use a large light with an orange coloured filter to create a fire appearance effect, which was a technique Sarah and I had some experience in creating before. We also decided whilst on the set that a few extra DEDO lights would aid us in lighting our green screen from behind, so we set these up on top of the larger light. Setting up was quite time consuming in this way, so we decided to split our group up into two smaller teams again to work on different parts of the pre-shoot set up; Carrie, Sarah and I worked on the technical elements such as setting up lighting equipment and ensuring that the XF100 camera settings were set appropriately to match our newly lit set up. Whilst we did this, Terry and Billy helped Ryan to run through his small acting scene and helped to work out the best way to direct the action that would be occurring. Organising ourselves as a group this way made the set up more efficient, as it meant that once we were all set up with the camera and lighting equipment, Ryan felt happy to go for a take and Terry and Billy were happy to direct him and ensured this was happening safely in such a confined area by having done a few previous rehearsal run throughs.

Before and after green screen & addition of lighting :

The problems that we encountered during the actual shoot mainly related to us having to carefully plan out and consider shots in terms of their type, length and how movement would affect the lighting against our green screen. This was quite problematic at first, however due to our efficient set up time, we managed to creatively problem solve as a group and take our time with it, which I feel was a strength of our group. After a few run throughs and practice takes/reviews, we were happy with the outcome, but continued to gain footage for extra safety for when it came to the edit. This consisted of a series of close ups on individual items that contribute towards the theme of 'the uncanny' within our set, as well as design and material choice elements such as the red handprints on the walls and the sticks layered wallpaper effect.

Overall, I feel that the shoot went well and we gained more than enough footage which has made us feel satisfied that the edit will hopefully work out well, especially with the green screen element. However, I would say that what I have learned from this experience is that working with sets can be extremely time consuming and come with many challenges, so organisation and allowing ourselves enough time to set up and plan out what we are doing would be advantageous in the future if we ever work on filming this type of set up against a green screen again. I would also think about the original set up again and spend more time planning out this, as although there were three separate sets all organised within the production studio space, the green screen did seem a bit cramped into one corner which could have contributed to the initial issues we encountered with working out the movement and how this would affect the lighting of our set.

'Uncanny' Moodboard and ideas

To develop our idea further and to gain some imagery to help to visualise our set build, I have created and been working on a moodboard of images, most of which relate to our idea but some of which also incorporate the theme of 'the uncanny' on Pinterest.

Here is the link to the Pinterest site (below) - I have sent the details of this to the rest of the group and added their email addresses to the admin settings so that we can all add visual images this way and share further ideas as a group. I set this up in the hope that it will be a productive way of sharing all of our individual views and insights on how we imagine the film is going to appear visually - as this is sometimes more difficult to get across in a conversation. I also think it will be an interesting tool to use as our project develops further and as we discover artists and existing artwork that we find interesting and relevant to our subject and theme along the way, whilst having a visual board of imagery to relate back to and keep us on track throughout the remainder of the module with what we aim to achieve.
https://www.pinterest.com/grencis/the-uncanny-cpr-project/

A sample of images currently displayed:

Set building week 2

During the past week, our set has made good progress which has been down to us making use of being able to book out the studio key outside of our timetabled sessions at times when any two of us have been available, being organised as a group and having planned out our set design in detail before we started the full build. After Sarah and I spent a good few hours attempting to get the sticks to remain on the wall with PVA glue on Friday, we found out on Monday morning that there was a glue gun available to us in the store room, which made the rest of the wall focused stage of the build a lot less time consuming and efficient to complete.

Having most of the group present in this week's session also allowed us to be more productive in terms of how much we managed to achieve within the timetabled studio session, as well as taking the pressure of Sarah and I to complete a lot of the work between the two of us.

Within Monday's three hour session, we managed to complete the walls and begin on looking through some of the potential possibilities for props for our set. Because the theme of our film is quite dark and mysterious, and the subject 'the uncanny', we aimed from the beginning to keep our props relatively simplistic and not overcrowd the detail of the four walls with too many distractions. Instead, we wanted to remain close to our idea of having a wooden shack building, but bring some old looking items from 'the inside' (of a room) to 'the outdoors', to create the impression that someone was possibly living in this shack building and that there was some history to the items within it.

On Thursday, Sarah, Billy and I spent a few extra hours filling up the remaining gaps on the walls with extra sticks we had collected, as well as added the texture of the red paint splats/handprints for the blood effect to a few parts of the set. This ensured that the set's walls were definitely up to the standard we wanted to achieve ready for Monday's session where the filming of the action was to take place.

The main props that we found worked really well on our set were:

 

• Floor surface - Cushions, rugs, creating a messy but lived in appearance.
• Furniture items - old, antique looking shelves, some kind of covered up box to resemble a seat.
• Decoration - painting of abandoned place, taxidermy (deer head, rabbit), old flowers, curtains?, weather clock.
• Character - blood splattered/handprinted on a few areas of walls, ornaments of people, wood to make fire - suggesting a lonely character but also quite creepy in terms of the blood etc.

Here are some photographs of our updated set:

Set building Week 1

This week we began the process of building our set. We had three walls available to us, and chose one of these to be one that already had the window space cut out of it, which will save us time and help us to visualise our film when it comes to wanting to create the green screen aspect. We began the process by looking at the space available to us and working out as a group how best to position the three walls. We decided to make it less box-like in terms of the structure, as we thought about where the camera would go and how this would appear on screen. Instead, we chose to position one of the outer walls at a slight angle, so that when it comes to filming the camera is not restricted by a confined space.

The first task that we were faced with once the walls were up was to remove any excess wallpaper and paint left from the last set that had been created. This was quite time consuming, however because all of our group of six were present, we managed to work together to split into smaller groups and work on different walls each.

After enough of the existing wallpaper and paint was scraped off, we then had the task of wallpapering our own set. We took our time with this, as we had not previously done this before and we wanted to ensure that we did a good job of it, as this was the first layer that was being built onto our set. We did come into a few problems with this however, which I think came down to us being too careful over it and therefore not getting much completed during the seminar session. The wallpaper that we bought also naturally has a bumpy texture to it, which made it slightly more difficult to tell whether we were adding too much wallpaper paste and making it bumpy or whether this was just down to the appearance of the wallpaper. I think considering it was our first time wallpapering a set, we did an alright job of it, and we have all spent a lot of time coming into the studio during the rest of the week since the seminar to finish and neaten it, however I would still consider this not to be our strongest set building task as a group.

After completing the wallpapering process on the remaining walls, we waited for 24 hours for it to fully dry, whilst communicating in our group throughout the week to arrange a suitable time to meet up and start on the paint work. On Thursday, myself, Sarah, Ryan and Billy met up at the studio and began to paint the set. Because our set is going to be a wooden shack in the woods, our intention was not for the paint to be perfectly neat, but instead to create a scattered look, as our aim is to fill the walls with sticks after the paint has dried. This is something that we are bearing in mind throughout the set building process - the idea of creating a messy look, which fits with not only our film idea and theme, but also within the overall subject of the 'uncanny' that forms the module brief.


                                                      

On Friday morning, Sarah and I were the only ones that came into the studio again, which was a little disappointing as we still had a lot left to do with our set, however we spent a good few hours in there doing what we could and made further arrangements to contact our group to ensure we gave them advance notice when planning to do the same next week. We spent the time starting to put the final layer onto the walls - the sticks that will make up the wooden shack building. We realised that we forgot to keep the PVA glue out of the props cupboard, so we firstly went to buy some so that we could get started on this on the day, rather than wait until Monday and give ourselves even less time to complete the task. Whilst we feel like our set will look great visually if we could fill the entire thing with sticks, we hit a bit of a creative problem whilst starting out with this. Although spending hours in the studio, we actually made little progress due to the sticks falling down continuously. We tried the best that we could to solve this problem in a number of ways, from holding them down for a few minutes, to trying less and then more glue and using smaller twigs instead of larger sticks, and eventually did end up with an almost solid section that has not yet fallen. However, we were aware of how time consuming this task was, and knew we needed to rethink how best to approach it in order to still create the visuals we had in mind for our finished set. We decided to email Susannah to ask for some advice on the type of glue we were using, and also organised a plan for next week in terms of the times that we will be booking the studio key out that are outside of the scheduled seminar session. I think that although this is a bit of a concern at the moment in terms of the tight timed schedule we have to complete the module, the set building process is still going well and we are all determined to overcome this to make the best set that we can, as well as committed to the project by coming into the studio at any available opportunity that we have outside of the timetabled sessions.