To sum up...

Name for the film

After brainstorming a few ideas with the group, I came up with the idea of the title 'Snowdrop', initially because of the colour of her dress. Also the snowdrop represents new beginnings (as it blooms in early Spring), much like the beginning of the character's escape, but also the colour having connotations of innocence and purity.

The thing that struck me the most though, was a Romanian myth that uses Snowdrop symbolism: each year the sun took on the form of a young girl as it returned to warm the land in the spring. One year, Winter refused to let go of his stronghold on the earth and took the young girl hostage. A Hero soon appeared to rescue his love from the grips of winter. A battle ensued, and the girl was set free, but not before Hero was wounded. As the sun began to rise into the sky, Hero fell to the ground and drops of his blood stained the earth. Tiny snowdrops burst forth in celebration of the return of spring. This inspired me as it has elements of being restrained but also elements of being set free, which is very much in relation to the theme of our film.

Overall, I have really enjoyed the experimental film module, probably more than any other module so far as I feel I have had more freedom to be creative and express my own ideas. I feel I have had a good team to work with who have all been enthusiastic and have contributed a lot to the process of making this film. I feel along the way some of my ideas didn't turn work out as planned but I am very happy with how the film is turning out. Experimental film is definitely one of my favourite types of film and I intend to work more in this area in the future.

Further editing

After showing Lewis our latest version of the film, it was decided that only a few things needed changing, such as keeping most of the narrative as cut transitions but only the end sequence to have fade transitions to keep the movement flow better. 

Other than that we just have to add the sound on. Jack R has edited most of the sound on ProTools and just needs to turn the volume up on the sound on Avid, once we put the sound over the timeline.
After this, we should then have a finished film. 

Sound

After starting the editing process and talking through our progress in the tutorial, we decided that sound should be a crucial, key element of the film that we could work on to really fit well with the photographic imagery to be effective to the audience. Agreeing that music would take the audience out of the film, we chose to work on the foley that would work most creatively against the silence.

We had already recorded foley on the shoot day, but it was difficult to pick up on the mic properly with lack of materials to use and too much background noise. Therefore, we booked out the sound studio at the film school to use for a whole day session, to record as much as possible to play around with in the sound design. 

During this day we recorded the most obvious sounds which would have come from the main character and her surroundings, using Avid Pro Tools and Audacity. These included:

• Footsteps - we tried out a few new ways to create this other than just actual footsteps, such as tapping wood or concrete. The best one we discovered was leather on wood, which sounded great when an echo was added.
• Heavy breathing - here I stood quite close to the mic and simply breathed a few different ways to portray certain emotions to the audience which wouldn't be as obvious in still photographs, such as fear or confusion, which was achieved by changing the speed or depth of my breathing.
• The razor - in the film the character picks up the razor and also drops it, and we wanted an exaggerated sound of the razor blade to emphasise its significance in the film. To do this we simply scraped a knife blade across the blade of the razor to get a nice metallic sound.
• Elastic - a main part of the narrative is that the character cannot free herself from the restraint attached to her, but she can in fact stretch it, even if it takes a lot of effort. It is made of elastic, and so in the studio we simply recorded the sound of elastic being stretched, which made an exaggerated crunchy sound. This would be useful to emphasise the importance of her restraint.
• Freeing herself - the protagonist uses the razor to cut the elastic rope from her, and so this is exactly what we recorded. We held it really close to the mic so that the sound would be loud and clear to play around with in the sound design. 
• Clothes rustling - as the character moves, so would the dress she is wearing. To create a more realistic effect of this happening to the audience, we recorded the sound of clothes rustling, which may be useful to us when editing sequences of movement together.

We also recorded some other sounds which may not be useful at all, but we thought it might be a good idea to experiment with them in post-production incase they created effective sounds that fit nicely with the foley to add more atmosphere to the film. These included paper ripping and blowing into a can.

Editing Process

As I am not an editor, there isn't much I can talk about in terms of the editing process as I'm not entirely sure how the software works. We chose to use Avid Media Composer to edit with as Jack S, who would be the main editor, works best on this program. As we had decided to use stills as opposed to video, the process was fairly simple - each frame could be edited in photoshop and then added to the timeline in the correct order, following our storyboard. 

First of all though we used the unedited photos just to create a rough cut in Avid, using the trim tool to change the shot lengths to adjust the pacing. From this we could get a rough idea of what the overall thing would look like. After showing this initial rough cut to Lewis, he gave us a few things to change in terms of pacing to make the film better. This included extending more dramatic shots but also keeping shots in the same part of a sequence at the same length so that they flow better. We also decided to cut out the sequence of the character dragging the sandbag as it didn't seem to work very well with the narrative. 

Next after making these changes, as well as cutting out some shots that we didn't need, we did an export which Jack R was going to use to create the soundscape, while we finished editing the actual visuals. Jack S used photoshop to make the highlights and shadows more exaggerated to make the contrast more obvious, as well as getting rid of unnecessary things in the background such as lights and wires, and of course now the sandbag. Making the cloth on the table with the razor seem smoother was important too, as you could see all the obvious dust particles on it, which didn't look great.

He also blackened out the hooded figures more to look more like silhouettes with backlighting, adding to the eerie effect.

After editing every single photo we added the edited versions of the photos into the timeline in Avid in the same positioning as the original photos in the cut.

Hooks in Flesh

Although still debating whether to add in the gory hook bits into our film, we decided to create them anyway, just incase we could use them.  We laid out the pigskin on a blank background and inserted the fish hooks through the skin; this was a difficult task as the skin was very tough, so we had to pierce holes in it first.  Then we poured fake blood (a cheap bottle of vampire blood from the fancy dress shop) over the area to make it look realistic.

In the end we decided not to use these photos and videos as we wanted to keep the film very simple with only the black and white stills of the narrative. However, we figured these could come in the useful for something else in the future anyway.

                                     

Shoot Day

The shoot day overall was a success - we got most of the footage we wanted and we definitely enjoyed doing it. Everyone contributed to the film effectively and suggested helpful ideas.

Setting up was an important part of the process to make sure everything could get done efficiently. This involved blocking out the light from the windows on the doors in our location by sticking black card over them; underneath the doors also brought in unwanted light which we hadn't thought about before, and so improvised by putting bags of quavers along bottoms of the doors, which surprisingly worked.

We only needed one lamp to get the lighting effect that we wanted, and so after setting this up with diffusion we simply moved it around the room with the camera to get the lighting right for each shot using a cross-lighting technique.

 

As fore-mentioned, I played the lead character, and wore the dress used in the test shoots. The only difference was I did it barefoot to make her seem like more of a traditional slave, but in this case a metaphorical one. I also wore less make-up so that it didn't distract from the rest of the imagery, as well as to look younger and more innocent.

A few of our friends agreed to be extras in the film, to play the background shadowed figures, and they were also useful throughout the day as runners. They helped us set up the equipment and brought food to the set from the student union during the lunch break. 

In order to get the shots we needed we followed our initial storyboard and photographic storyboard, which acted as our shot list without having to write another one out, and shot on a DSLR, as this is best for photographs.

As well as photographs, we did film some of it as video footage though, just incase we did want to experiment with moving image as well as still image in the edit. We managed to get most of it shot, however the last part of the narrative where the girl now wakes up in a black dress and cloak to match the others, wasn't shot very well, particularly in terms of lighting, because we had to rush filming towards the end as we had to hand the key back for the room. Despite this though, I think it could possibly look effective without this bit even in the narrative, but it can be decided in the edit. 

Pina - The Here and After

Wim Wenders created a dance experimental documentary entitled 'Pina', which I was shown a trailer for in a specialist workshop class. I noticed a clip of a girl in a white dress on a rope, which is a very similar concept to my own film, and decided to research the dance and found it was from a piece called 'The Here and After'. The character runs around on the rope trying to get away from the restraint, to represent personal struggle. Later, a dark figure shovels a black soil substance onto her, ruining her pure white dress - the darker parts of life are taking over and she struggles to get away. This again represents how she is being controlled by the factors around her, which is very similar to the concept in our film.
 At first I was upset that our idea seemed to have already been done in a way, particularly visually and in theme, however it made me realise that this could be a big inspiration instead - it shows our narrative will work. Although some of the basic visual elements are similar, the location, cinematography, editing and sound will be very different anyway.