CCR

Reflection

Before we started this project, I had seen some examples of some past projects and saw that

one of the biggest flaws, in my opinion, was a lack of direction in terms of the plot. Many

people were not able to really think of this opening as literally the beginning part of a movie,

and that kind of myopic approach toward the stories turned some the openings into more of a

short film. Coming into this project, I felt it was imperative to come up with a pretty detailed

plot about the rest of the movie, that way we could be more intentional with what the goals of

the introduction should be. After coming up with a pretty elaborate idea for a feature-length

movie, my partner and I thought that the best introduction would be one that introduces the

main character and kind of hints at the complexities of his personality and also hints at the

theme.

This opening is truly an amalgamation of a lot of my favorite psychological thrillers both from

the past and the present. The genre is incredibly versatile, many of the movies lean more

towards horror, but others are able to portray the same psychological  distress in a less

traditional way.

If you were to just judge the  opening to this film you might say that the movie leans more

toward the horror side of psychological thrillers, but that isn’t exactly our intention with the

movie as a whole. While the movie will not shy away from violence and gore, this movie, just

like the subgenre, is able to distinguish itself from Horror because of the nature of the main

character acting as both a protagonist and antagonist.

For our main character, Trevor, we drew a lot inspiration from the character Travis Bickle

from Taxi driver. Their names are obviously similar, but they are alike in a lot of other ways.

Travis is a strange character who takes on the role of vigilante in his city, wanting to clean

the streets of prostitution and crime, yet he is a participant in that same immoral culture. As

  mentioned in the film, “he’s a prophet and a pusher, a walking contradiction” This

complexity, or maybe even hypocrisy, that Travis is able to express is something I really

wanted to bring into our movie.

Our theme is kind of built on the premise that the line between good and bad is not always

very clear can also be completely twisted by manipulating ourselves or manipulating others.

Our character Trevor, was a perfect catalyst for exposing this theme because he truly cares

about the people he kills (which is seen when he hides the hammer to avoid frightening him,

cries at the sight of the victims wounds, and how he keeps boxes of what’s left of them in his

room to almost keep him company in a way) but his obsessive need to keep these people in

his life pushes him towards violence. This raises a lot of questions about his values because

if he truly cared for these people, why would he have brutalized and killed them?

This draws a lot of parallels to the daily lives of the viewers and makes them question the

way they see others and themselves. Most people see a serial killer or other violent, mentally

unstable people and think that they must be the most evil people alive, with no morals or

sense of right and wrong. But what is the difference between a killer and a politician who

fabricates wars that kill thousands or a corporation that exploits their workers or poisons and

pollutes people’s drinking water. I’m not really one for overt political statements and I don’t

want the movie to be some kind of political propaganda, but these are very real fears and

sentiments that exist especially now with the political climate we live in, and in the real movie

we would’ve wanted to bring in politics by including different characters that help do that.

But, on a smaller scale, this theme and story relates to the viewers themselves and their

personal lives. Because psychological thrillers usually are marketed toward an audience that

is seventeen plus, these people usually are mentally developed enough to see these and

characters on screen, and really think about the people in their own lives and about how

people they love or cherish, can also be affecting their lives negatively, and also maybe how

they are not treating the people they care for in the most positive ways. This isn’t necessarily

going to mean that they should change, but it is more of a way to open up the audience’s

mind about how humans don’t always stay 100% true to of their values.

Although we brought a lot of the psychological thriller’s gore, mentally unstable character,

and the theme, there were of a conventions that we didn’t necessarily adhere to. One of the

most prominent the title. Most of the title’s in this genre tend to be short and concise, I was

pretty drawn to the idea of a long poetic title. This truly stems from my profound adoration for

the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but I didn’t really think a long title would

work in this genre until I remembered that the Silence of the Lambs exists and it was a both

critically acclaimed and a box office hit, so I had a bit more confidence in making my title

longer. I took my title from a poem from Stephane Mallarme because I am an avid reader of

French poetry, i’m really not that pretentious, but the truth was I was just reading some

quotes and that title happened to be in a line of poetry I really liked the sound of and the

themes were pretty similar.

Some of the conventions in the realm of production that we didn’t follow was the use of eerie

music and low key lighting. Although there are some brilliant approaches to eerie music, I

wasn’t fond of putting music in our movie because the music would have been too cheesy or

really poorly made had we gotten it royalty free or if we composed it. I opted for silence

because it really made it just as eerie as music would have and the title also literally has the

word silent in it so…

We did have a lot of problems regarding sound because there was a lot of white noise with

the stuff we recorded into the camera so I had to reconstruct the soundscape in post-

production. Also, movies aren’t ever truly silent (even silent movies had music), so we had to

add some kind of noise in the background. I chose rain, which I muffled and lowered, but

according to my partner it sounded like a bathroom fan… either way, they both fit the story

and add an element of controlled silence, which was what I was going for.

Mixing the sounds was tough because I have a cold, so there’s lots of fluids in my ear, I can’t

really hear that well. I have also never really been good at sound mixing, so that aspect of

the film really suffered as a result of all these things.

The high-key lighting was kind of a choice because I knew low-key be too hard to pull off in a

bathroom because of the fact that it is such a tight space and there would also be a lot of

light spilling and reflecting because of all the white that's inside bathrooms like: the tiles, the

sink, the tub, the toilet. We opted for high-key lighting because, not only did it make it a

thousand times easier to light the scene but also created kind of a sterile environment that is

as equally unsettling as low-key lighting. it also helps to highlight the blood, because the

bright red stands out beautifully in the white setting.

The  production of this opening was quite fun. I have quite a lot of experience making films

and working with a camera, but to my partner this was relatively new to her, and kind of

teaching her some of the stuff I knew about lights, cameras, blocking, etc. was quite new and

enjoyable.

Something new that I did with this film that I really haven't done in the past is acting. Usually

I'll be behind the camera and I have a lot of control over how the shots are guided and how

the blocking goes, but this time I had to put a lot of faith in my partner to make sure the focus

is right, exposure was perfect, and the camera movements flowed. Although there were

some slip ups I think I learned a lot about how to delegate the tasks on set that normally I

would do.

I have also struggled in the past with breaking the 180 rule because I have a pretty horrible

sense of space, but I made sure not to mess that up in this one.I also learned a lot about

production and efficiency. The production went pretty smooth because we were able to stick

to the schedule we made and detailed in the pre-production stage, and we did a lot of

planning and discussing a lot about what we wanted out of the shots and out the

performances.

Technology played an enormous role in obviously the creation of this digital piece of media,

but also how me and my partner communicated. Every time we talked about something or

came up with an idea for costumes, production design, a shot we really liked, or really any

step of the pre-production process we shared examples on Google Drive. We made folders

which included lots of pictures and documents detailing exactly what we wanted to make with

this project. We also collaborated a bit on the script with a really great screenwriting software

called WriterDuet, where my partner and I could both edit and comment on the script.

Some technologies we used in production were my DSLR (Lumix g7) and my microphone

(Rode VideoMicro Pro). For editing we used Premiere Pro, which is a very great editing
software that gives a lot of freedom to be creative (but loves to crash).

Overall, I consider this project a success, and moving on from this point into distribution, I

think the best way to get this to a lot more mainstream audiences is bringing it to some horror

film festivals because it is a niche audience and the genre is not too far off. This could help

generate a following of lovers of this movie, and hopefully aid in bringing it forward to more

mainstream audiences. Streaming is also another strong contender for this content,

stemming off the popularity of shows and movies like Making a Murderer or Mindhunter

which have found lots of success in streaming.

Project

This is it... I'm done!

Preferably, please watch it on Youtube or the quality of the image will be absolutely disgusting and will do a huge disservice to all the hard work my partner and I put into this film.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WFtGKmv6TD2y8cO-JdaCO-1Z2SRbSe_O/view

A Harsh Reality Check

Filmmaking is one of those things that we often underestimate. We underestimate how much knowledge you need, how many hours are needed, how much planning there needs to be done, etc. etc.

The reality is, after two years of filmmaking, I still have no idea what I'm doing. I know how to do a lot of technical and artistic things when it comes to making films, but it feels like the more I make or the more I learn, the less I actually know.

And work... so much work truly goes into this with such unsatisfactory results. After doing a little bit of math, I put in around 120 hours of work into making this film. 120 hours for 2 minutes of film.

That's 5 whole days of nonstop work, and it really doesn't feel like it. I think the problem lies in how we tend to underestimate how long and how hard something should be.

Something as simple as re-recording some sounds took me over 20 hours to do. Why? Because every time I recorded a sound, I needed to take an SD out of the sound recorder, plug it into my computer, import it into a document, import it into Premiere Pro, select the clip I needed, adjust levels, add effects, and then redo it because I messed up. I did this over 100 times, and, quite honestly, the audio was the weakest aspect of this film.

It's so easy to just point and shoot, but really putting in the effort gets you to produce a better quality product... or so you would think. Really the amount of work you put into a project is exponentially more than the quality of the product produced.

I just spent fifteen minutes making a really pointless visual, which further proves my point about engaging in fruitless, unnecessary labor. There were a lot of headaches and a lot of time spent making this project when it really only made such a small difference, and the more time I spent on it the less of a difference it really made. 

BOTTOM LINE: Filmmaking is hard... but I work harder.

Soundscaping

Foley is defined as: relating to or concerned with the addition of recorded sound effects after the shooting of a film.

In our film, that really means... ignoring to record any quality audio on set and worrying about it all in post production.

If you want to see me struggle for about a minute to get the sound of a hammer and a shower curtain check out these videos...

I wish I could scream at myself to take off that watch. It doesn't match the outfit, and worse, the ticking is going to ruin all the audio...

I'm talking to myself to make sure that when I'm editing I know exactly what was being recorded or why certain pieces and clips didn't work. This speeds up the editing process about a thousand times because I know exactly where to jump to when selecting clips. 

Post-Production is a nightmare...

The Resolution Problem

I made a stupid choice of shooting this intro in 4K, which is an absolutely enormous file size. When I edit, I am basically just guessing because the files and are so big I cannot playback what I am editing. I imagine this is what editing with real film looks like because I truly have no idea what the end result will look like.

I have exported it a couple of times to see what it may look like and I had some huge issues with adobe because the sequence I was editing in was 30 FPS for some reason I still haven’t figured out. This essentially ruined a lot of the edit, so I had to create a new sequence with the right dimensions and 24 FPS.

So far, this is taking me way too long to edit and I very much regret shooting in 4K.

Reshoots

Two of the shots that we shot during the weekend were super rough. One was a close-up of the teeth which came out very shaky and the white balance was off that it made the shot a little too green and yellow. The next shot with the boxes also came out completely out of focus, so I had to go in and reshoot all of this stuff by myself.

I am not going to lie, I should have been more adamant about using a tripod on set instead of trying to do these shots handheld. It would have saved me an enormous headache of taking out all my equipment and making a huge mess for literally four seconds of footage.

Color Grading

I can’t color grade. I just don’t know how to do it. I also have a really bad eye for these kinds of things, but it is essential to the project because it makes a huge difference in the picture.

I’m basically just fumbling around with the colors and just upping the contrast to make it seem like I know what I am doing, but I have no clue at all.

I’ve watched some YouTube tutorials about color grading, but I think the footage looks so ugly because it looks like a YouTube video, not like an actual movie.

Shooting and Issues we encountered on set

Shooting was pretty smooth. We had allocated a lot of time to make sure that everything came out smooth and not rushed. We had lots of time to make mistakes and to quite literally just take our time.

The actor was really chill and worked well with us. We managed to get him in and out of the set in like one hour and fifteen minutes, so I consider that a success. Usually I have a hard time getting what I need from actors and they have to stay for long periods of time, but we were very timely for this project.

Despite the shoot being quite successful, we did encounter a few issues.

1) A loud family. My dogs kept barking and my parents and siblings love to talk like they are in a concert, so virtually all the audio we recorded needs to be foley in the edit.

2) Fake blood is hard to make. It took us an enormous amount of time to make the fake blood. It was very hard to try and get the right consistency and color.

3) Low-Quality lights. Some of the shots were useless because of horizontal lines that formed on the screen. This happens because I have very low quality LED lights that cause flickering if we shoot at a shutter speed faster than 1/50. A couple of shots had to be tossed.

4) Makeup does not stick. For the wound on the victim, Andrea needed to apply special effects makeup, but it kept sticking to her hands and not the guy’s stomach. It also dissolved when we began to shoot.

5) Focus. It is hard to pull focus on a tiny little display and a tiny little focus ring. This caused a lot of issues in the close up shots because the actor would move slightly forward or backward and completely ruin the focus, but I couldn’t really catch it on the camera’s display monitor.

Production Design and Art Direction

We are going to need lots of props to make this setting and story come alive, besides hair and costume.

To stay true to the era of burnt lungs, we bought fake cigarettes that are used in real Hollywood movies. These are the same cigarettes used by a young Natalie Portman in Leon: the professional.

We also neeeded to get fake teeth because after he kills the guy, he rips up his body and stores the stuff he can keep. We got some weird resin teeth off Amazon that were absolutely great.

Last but not least, we needed boxes to pull of the very last shot of Trevor with his victims. This was going to be hard because boxes aren’t exactly cheap and we needed lots of them. Our solution came out of pure luck. We went to Office Depot to buy boxes, but we saw a ton of boxes just lying around that they were going to throw away. We asked if we could just take them and they said yes. That saved us like 15 dollars, so we were really happy about that.

We also got creative with the names and made the first letter of each name spell out a word, but it didn't actually matter because my body blocks most of them in the final cut.

For the bathroom, we designed it in a way that made it look very 70s. The walls are painted with very muted beige colors, and we picked out a shower curtain that has that same feel with the stripes and circles.

We also decided to use a hammer instead of using the axe like I had originally written in the script because we didn't know where to get one and we did not want to come across as weirdos trying to buy an axe. A hammer had the right balance between very painful, and kind of normal to carry around.

Equipment

I have accumulated a lot of pretty low quality equipment over the years that will do the job just fine for this short film.

As my camera I will be using the LUMIX g7.

For lighting, because we are shooting in a bathroom with lots of mirrors and white, I really only need one powerful light, so I’m using a Husky work light.

For audio, I will use the Rode videomicro.

There are a lot of limitations with this equipment, but, like I said it does the job very well and the project will be really good quality.

Trevor's Costume

Since the movie takes place in the seventies, we wanted to make sure the costumes and environment look and feel like they are from that era. We turned to pictures from magazines from the time period to help us.

We really liked the idea of a turtleneck and a large jacket because it encapsulated the era and it looked really cool.

We went to Goodwill to find some cheap clothes, and after trying on a bunch of outfits, we narrowed it down to this combination.

It cost us about 20 dollars total, but I know I will make use of the jacket in the future because it is still pretty stylish even for today.

By the way, I do realize how dumb I look in these photos...

We felt as though he also needed aviator glasses to really complete the look, so we are going to get some in the near future.

The hairstyle was also something we kept in mind. I had been growing out my hair for a while because of a bad haircut, but I wanted to get it cut again. however, after I signed myself up for this role, I am going to have to leave it long.

We looked through a bunch of hairstyles, but we didn't know if they were going to work until we tested them with my hair.

We tried a variety of 70s hairstyles, but ultimately stuck with the Ted Bundy comb-over. 

THESE AUDITIONS WERE TRASH

After our casting call expired, we looked to see all of our auditions, and nobody really stood out for the part of our lead.

Some were very timid and others just completely missed the emotional beats in the audition. 

After some discussion, we figured it would be better if I just played the lead role for the introduction and called up one of the actors from the site to play the role of the victim.

This is going to add another level of difficulty to the project because I was supposed to be behind the camera, but now that I am acting in it, I can't do it.

Since my partner does not know how to use the camera with the same fluidity as I do, it may slow down production and/or we might have to take a day for her to practice a bit with the camera.

Aside from that, I am not an actor. I still think I can do a better job than all the people who auditioned, but that doesn't actually mean I have any natural talent.

I'm going to have to be able to cry on command and also convey the rollercoaster of emotions that Trevor goes through in the opening... I hope this works out...

The Field-of-View Dilemma

The location for our opening is a bathroom, and based on the descriptions and sequence of events in the film, we figured that the bathroom I have in y home would work the best for the scene. However, there is one issue... it is very, very small.

To get the opening shot we need, which is a push back on the main character on top of the toilet. Given the nature of the shot, we would only have about 3 feet of space from the subject to the camera. This would not be so much of a problem if I had the proper camera to pull of the shot, but I have a Lumix G7, which is a great camera, but it has a very small micro 4/3 sensor size.

The 2x crop factor means that our angle-of-view or field-of-view is chopped in half, which will make it very hard to get the shot wide enough to get the shot we need.

If I were to use the lowest focal length on my lens, 14mm, on a full-frame sensor, I would get a horizontal angle-of-view of about 104 degrees. A 14mm lens gives me about half that angle, and after doing some math, the sensor size problem because quite apparent.

This basically means that if we use the lowest focal length I have we would only get about 3.84 ft of horizontal view. 

After some measurements and discussion of how wide we need to with the shot, we think that a horizontal view of 4.5 feet would be the optimal width to get the shot we need. After reverse engineering the math, it seems that a 12mm lens will do the trick, giving us 4.45 ft of horizontal view.

Obviously, it is just a little bit short of perfect, but it will do. The real issue is that I don't have a 12mm lens, and they aren't cheap. 

This shot is integral to the aesthetics, but I am not spending this much money to get it. I will have to find another solution...