48 Hour Challenge Evaluation

48 Hour Challenge Evaluation

On Monday the 16th September 2019, our class was set a 48 Hour challenge on the topic, change. There were A few rules, the video should be under three minutes, and roughly over 1 minute, most importantly it was due in exactly 48 Hours it was set.

The first thing I did was think of ideas fast. However, the night before (Sunday) I had a late-night, so I found myself still half-asleep Monday morning. Fortunately, a quick coffee fixed that. I was partnered up with Taryn Snaith and Kate Gillard, two very creative ladies. Taryn and Kate had the idea to incorporate a seasonal change into our short film. Taryn and Kate thought a season change could have dragged for our audience, so they added into the mix a relationship change during the seasons.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a male actor willing to film on Tuesday morning, so we were only left with Taryn as our only actor. Looking back now, although we had a plan B which was Just Taryn looking around the filming location we had chosen, I called the Walled Garden in Wrington, and we should have chosen our second idea based on seasonal change.

Our next idea was to incorporate the change of seasons with seasonal depression. Seasonal depression is partially related to the lack of Vitamin D absorbed by the human body during the wintertime, which is known to cause ‘Seasonal Depression’ so my idea would have been to have Taryn still go to the Walled Garden, look around, but instead of taking in the beauty of the gardens just staring at her phone, we planned to have close-ups of the phone during the seasonal change, we also planned, that Taryn’s addiction to her phone grows lesser and lesser present throughout the year of transition, as I had some winter footage of the Walled Gardens already captured from the winter. However, it would be easy to show the change of seasons.

We went with the first undeveloped option; however, as I was delegated the cinematographer, I had little say over the matter. For this project I organised a suitable location for Taryn and Kates Idea and shot it. In hindsight I could have possibly suggested that the original idea of; Taryn, who is already in a relationship before the story starts is wandering around a place where her and her boyfriend used to visit / first met, then throughout the year they grow further and further apart, in the background of Taryn’s story would also be one of the change of seasons, then at the end of the year Taryn and her boyfriend ‘Kaine’ breakup, alternatively Taryn wanted ‘Kaine’ to die and her to be grieving over the fact he passed away, but I thought this was a bit of an afterthought.

The filming. What went well? So, I arrived on location early, at around 1 p.m. on Tuesday the 17th September, with Taryn and Kate coming shortly after. We began by asking the staff at the Walled Garden for permission to film; they said yes, so we began. As my uncle Ian already owns the ‘gardens’ I had permission to film there already. However, we did need permission to film inside.

The first parts of the film were the shots of Taryn strolling around location, looking around, for these shots, I used the 12mm Lumix lens on the GH4 with an aperture of f22, which gave me a broad focus field, I then mounted the GH4 onto my new DJI Ronin SC which turned out to be perfect for the whole shoot! We captured smooth, clear and sharp footage. Something unique that was a trial for this project, was shooting in the Log format, which is an extremely flat colour profile, which gave me plenty of room to play with colours in the edit. A mistake I made was instead of finetuning the colours I just cranked the saturation to max in some shots to bring out the blue in the sky and the broad range of colours of the flowers.

The footage I captured was of good quality and from this shoot, I captured some of my favourite clips on this shoot of my whole-time filming at the Walled Gardens. Even when we went in the café to film, everything ran smoothly, and we were in and out of the gardens within 3 hours, in this time we managed to capture, A-Roll, B-roll despite constant retakes of one shot in particular, which took about 45 minutes, this was a shot of Taryn sat on a bench, the reason this shot took so long to film was because for this shot I needed to not only jump over a hedge but also try not to get walkers in the shot and a gardener working just one foot to the right of where I was trying to get the clip, for this shot, I also needed to try and ‘pull-focus’ on a photo Taryn was going to place down on the table, this shot was meant to be at the end of the video but by communication issues in the edit this scene was at the beginning.

Editing went smoothly In the two hours we had. I thought we didn’t do too badly, in fact, I think the final film looked smooth with no flow issues, which is what I like to see In the work I shoot / edit. Finally, although I made mistakes with our colour grading, it looked a tone better than the raw log we filmed in!

Now, onto the screening. During our screening there was confusion over the story, which is understandable; it wasn’t the most straightforward story to understand. We had an actor pull out, so we were stuck with a fundamental premise of a story. Though we were saved by the seasonal change we did incorporate into our film using my archived footage, which I was told was fine to use.

Our audience also picked up on the vividness levels, in all honesty, it was too vivid even for my liking, however this is what our director Taryn wanted, personally, I would have turned the vividness down a tiny bit, as I do like colours to pop to a certain extent, this criticism is debatable as different people have different personal preferences when it comes to colour, as well as this the lack of colour calibration on the main projector made the blacks darker and the bright parts brighter, almost like an HDR filter which I believe did harm the visuals of our film. In the future, I will do a test screening before the final one.

Our last criticism was my fault, Taryn’s phone was really smudgy in shots as well as this it was not bright enough to pick up on camera, in the future I would use a phone with a brighter screen, some phones have a rating at 1000 nits compared to the iPhone’s 400-600 nits, so with a bit more research, we could have had a brighter image, with a different phone.

What went well? Cinematography went well, I took my time on shots to make sure we got the perfect framing, stabilisation and camera focus was also on point, this project was my second time shooting Log and first time editing Log, so I had fun with adding this element to my filming skills. Kate and Taryn were also accommodating when it came to the filming, pointing out continuity errors; this made things easier for me when it came to the editing.

People also liked the incorporation of different seasons, as it gave a different look to our film, some people also liked the vivid colours. The dynamic range saved from shooting in Log was also appreciated (non-blown out highlights and un-crushed shadows). But most of all, the film was called cinematic, and I (as a cinematographer) I am pleased about that, it put a smile on my face.

Altogether this was an enjoyable little project. I wish we spent more time developing the story and the content. Kate and Taryn were great, and I look forward to working with them both again, perhaps in a future project.

Charlie Derham