Video & Sound Production - Project 2: Shooting Practice
12.09.2023 - 24.10.2023 / Week 03 - Week 09
Ilhan Rayan bin Khairul Anwar / 0361205
Video & Sound Production / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Project 2 - Shooting Practice
LECTURES
INSTRUCTIONS
PRACTICAL
For our project 2, it would be split into two different exercises similar to our project 1.
Exercise 1 / Project 2A: Production Shoot
For our first exercise of Project 2, we had to take part in a production shoot where the class would be split in half and had to recreate a storyboard provided to us by Mr. Martin, from there we would have to create our own dialogue and edit the video into a trailer in any style we want. For my group, we had to recreate a set of shots from the Netflix series BEEF starring Steven Yuen and Ali Wong.
 |
| Figure 1.1: Crew List |
We started off by discussing what the crew list would be and who would be taking what role, I originally wanted to do Actor 1 but that was taken quickly so I decided to do something easy and went with lighting crew with my friend Razique so we could work together.
 |
| Figure 1.2: Production Shoot photo, Week 4 (19/9/23) |
While I don't have many photos of the actual production shoot, I'll try and explain the process with what I have. Our first production shoot took place on Week 4 and was mainly to see if we were able to work on our own for next week as Mr. Martin would be unavailable and wanted to see if we could handle shooting without his supervision.
A few days before we started our shooting on Week 5, I was messaged by Adriena asking if I could play the role of the husband since we didn't have any other extras and I was one of the only guys in the group who was willing to act, so I took the role and brought an outfit from home to try and recreate his outfit in the storyboard.
 |
| Figure 1.3: My Outfit for the shoot, Week 5 (26/9/23) |
 |
| Figure 1.4: Photo from the set of my scene, Week 5 (26/9/23) |
Because I was acting as the husband for the scene, my partner Razique had to do most of the work for the lighting crew which wasn't much as he just had to make sure the lighting was in the right position and the right temperature.
 |
| Figure 1.5: Outside Shoot, Week 5 (26/9/23) |
Some scenes where our services weren't required included outdoor shots where the natural lighting took over the scenes and because there was a lack of outdoor plugs for our equipment to use. Once our shoot was done however our DOP and Sound team exported the files and sent them to us in a google drive.
Because we weren't allowed to follow the exact same structure as the trailer or the storyboard, we all had to get creative with how we were going to edit this as we all had to individually edit our own version of the project. I decided to make mine like a thriller trailer, combining elements of crime and horror based off of the footage that we had. Once issue that bugged me for a bit was the fact that our dialogue didn't perfectly match up in certain scenes, additionally nobody kept track of what audio files went with which scene so we had to figure it out until somebody created the list for us.
 |
| Figure 1.6: Final Timeline Screenshot, Week 7 (9/10/23) |
Outside of the issues stated previously, there weren't many other issues when it came to editing the video. I tried to make sure that my video didn't follow the storyboard one-to-one by doing things out of order and sorting them into a new order that made sense.
Figure 1.6: Production Shoot Final Edit, Week 7 (9/10/23)
YouTube video link:
Exercise 2 / Project 2B: TikTok / Insta Video
For our second exercise of Project 2, we had to create a TikTok / Instagram Reel of ourselves that essentially represented us as an individual, which essentially gave us full creative reign over what we can do for our project as there weren't many limitations, only that it has to be less than one minute in order to fit into the "shorts" category of videos. Mr. Martin also added on the idea that we could build on the "Self Titled" project that we did last semester for Digital Photography and Imaging which planted that idea in my mind for later. We started off by creating a project proposal slideshow for what we had in mind.
Figure 2.1: Insta/TikTok Video Proposal, Week 8 (17/10/23)
For my project, I wanted to do something funny so I decided to emulate a series of reaction videos known as "My Honest Reaction" videos where people take clips of famous people wearing suits looking stern or serious and editing in music and flashy edits and transitions, labelling them as "my honest reaction" and became used as reaction images / gifs. I'm a big fan of the modern era of internet humour as it can often be quite nonsensical or completely incomprehensible if you don't follow it. But being able to understand these memes and jokes is what makes these style of videos interesting so I chose to recreate one style of them.
Going into this project I didn't have any specific storyboard in mind as my mood board, visual references and story board all used the same six videos which had the style that I wanted to capture. But my plan for the story was simple, it would first start off with my "character" from my Self-Titled project last semester and it would follow him throughout the video, only for a second character of mine to appear behind him and take over the rest of the video.
 |
| Figure 2.2: Reference photo |
 |
| Figure 2.3: Shot Composition, Week 9 (21/10/23) |
As seen in figure 2.3, this is what I had in mind for the scene where it would be my character sitting down on the bench while the second character would appear behind him in the doorframe. I used my older brother as the stunt double for this scene as he was also my camera man for the shoot. I also shot the project in my father's art studio as it was quite a nice location due to the paintings which added onto the somewhat sophisticated feel of the video.
My original plan was to shoot both scenes in one take, with my sitting down on the bench first and striking a pose before getting up and changing into my second outfit and performing my scene in that costume all while my phone recorded everything. But my brother and I felt that it would be too difficult and would take up a lot of space so we opted to just shoot twice and make sure the camera was steady. Because I was already in my suit we decided to shoot all of our scenes in the suit first.
Figure 2.4: Introduction Scene Reference, Week 9 (21/10/23)
There's a very specific style that I wanted to emulate with my scenes where the camera would rotate as it would either move towards me or away from me. Using my brother as an example again, I explained to him how I wanted to do the first shot where the camera rotates into portrait mode. Because of the way iPhones are, I had to start the video in portrait mode, rotate it into landscape mode and then have the camera perform the movement of transitioning into portrait mode.
Once he understood what I wanted to do, we filmed the rest of our scenes and we mainly free styled it since it my shoot was meant to be inspired by a style of video rather than it's own thing where I would have to create my own storyboard. Once we were done I exported all of my videos to my google drive and started editing.
 |
| Figure 2.5: Two versions of me in the same shot, Week 8 (21/10/23) |
The main issue was trying to create the effect seen in figure Figure 2.3 but with just me, after doing a bit of googling I found an incredibly simple solution to this. All I had to do was to take the crop feature and crop out the footage that I didn't need, so it only had the footage of my in the doorway overlaying the original footage of my on the bench.
 |
| Figure 2.6: Effects Timeline Screenshot, Week 8 (21/10/23) |
Once that was done, I arranged my footage into the order that I wanted and made sure to sync up the cuts between them with the music. After that I started playing around with effect layers to try and create the shiny look in the videos.
 |
| Figure 2.7: Full Timeline Screenshot, Week 9 (29/10/23) |
Figure 2.8: Self-Titled Video Final, Week 9 (29/10/23)
I originally only posted this to my youtube channel as had a dedicated "shorts" section for portrait style videos and because I didn't want to create a new TikTok account just to post one thing. After a while I decided to upload it to my school Instagram account as well just in case they didn't accept it being on YouTube for some reason.
YouTube Shorts Link:
Instagram Link:
FEEDBACK
Week 6:
Don't edit the video like a one-to-one recreation of the trailer, be creative and edit it in your own way.
REFLECTION
Experience
These two exercises were pretty interesting and entertaining, I found my role as lighting crew to be a bit boring as I just had to make sure the lighting matched the storyboard and move the lighting equipment around for each scene but being the extra for our project was a lot more fun. It was a bit difficult trying to keep a straight face but it was also a good learning experience for me. I found the second project to be a lot more fun as I had way more creative freedom and space to explore what I could do and seeing all my friends and family members enjoy what I created really made me happy.
Observation
While we were filming for our group production shoot I noticed how interesting it was to finally be able to work with a group larger than five people as seeing so many people working together in different roles for our shoot was a cool experience. Being able to take part in the production and watching everything happen felt like I was on a proper film set, albeit not as professional or high quality as ones I've been to before.
Findings
Overall I found this project to be pretty refreshing for me, I was already familiar with this kind of work since I did a lot of it in high school so being able to work on it again, reuse and refresh my knowledge after a while was quite useful for me.
Comments
Post a Comment