For our preliminary task we wanted to do something a bit more exciting then just walking in a room and having a few lines of dialogue. Although it does include these features several times, it also has a lot more to it. We wanted to run some tests in preparation for our opening two minutes, which included testing out several fights scenes, so to kill two birds with one stone, we integrated a few fights scenes into our preliminary task.
The film was shot in eight hours, and editing is taking considerably longer, due to the complexity of the piece. Obviously the main difficulty we encountered was choreographing fight sequences, shooting them from several angles and all the while keeping it safe. I have had a bit of training in cinematic fight choreographing, so I rose to the challenge of the numerous sequences that the film entailed. Each fight had it's own unique feel to test out different styles, so each one had it's seperate challenges.
The first fight was a fairly standard, Bourne-style fight, with punches and pushes. It was shot down the side of a house in a very closed in alley, that allowed a lot of pushing into walls and gave it a claustrophobic feel. Despite its fairly conventional approach it was still a challenge to work out how the fight would progress, and how the protagonist would overcome the antagonist. The hardest part of the fight was when I am thrown into the piece of wood, and then I hit Lee (our lead) with the wood. This was hard as the wood was very solid, and was painful to hit at the sort of pace we were looking for. We had to put padding up our sleeves in order to avoid any major bruises, we had to move at a slightly slower pace. However this pace was sped up in editing by the removal of a few frames just before the hit. I used this technique for most of the hits in the sequence, and it made the hits look much more brutal. I am particularly proud of the first punch thrown, as this looks incredibly realistic. It looked very brutal without any editing at all, but once I removed some of the frames it looked very painful.
The next scene was a lot easier as the fight wasn't so long and was much more one sided, with a quick resolution. This meant that we did not have to choreograph as much and it wasn't too much hard work for our lead actor who was already tired from his previous fight scene. I kept the editing tight for the take-out of the roof guard, and tried to keep the disarming manouvre to a beat, so it was very fast paced and very stylish. The more that is cut out of a fight, the faster it is.
I really enjoy the next scene as it looks visually striking and is a very exciting scene. It was interesting trying to come up with a scene using guns instead of just a usual fist fight, and it was challenging trying to keep it exciting despite the distance between the shooters. In the edit it was slightly faster then I intended and is over in just over ten seconds, which, although disappointingly short, nonetheless is one of the most brilliant scenes in the film. To give the scene its cinematic realism I added some muzzle flashes to the guns, as without them the guns looked fake and were awkward to watch. The muzzle flashes are no entirely realistic, and they do not always look great, but on such a low budget they worked, and were much better than just leaving the guns. One big thing that I feel we need to work on is our gun recoils. When the guns fire, the actors' reaction is not entirely realistic, and I think that before we film our opening two minutes we need a training day on gun recoils.
The next scene in the bathroom offered both the audience and the character time to recover from the rollercoaster opening of the film. A slightly comedic element can be found in the shot of Agent Davidson fixing his hair in the middle of an infiltration. Another reason for this scene was that we needed to prove obviously that we could execute match on action effectively through opening a door. I had noticed in a lot of other peoples preliminary tasks, the smoothness of the transition between grabbing the door handle in one shot, and opening in the next was weak, as it was not fast enough. In reality, opening a door does not take long at all, and I think a lot of people assumed it needed much longer. Not only does this detract from the action, but it looks bad. I think in ours we 'opened the door' effectively, and we used the close-up to pick up the pace again and throw the audience back into the action.
The next kill is very comedic - a terrorist wearing a balaclava to the shower? From here the film takes a very comedic twist, and becomes much more fun. I confess that this was not entirely intentional, but the arrival of a new cast/crew member opened limitless comedic possibilities, and from then it just seemed right that the film should slowly become more and more absurd. The final scene was planned to be exactly what it became, but originally we had no comedy building up to it, but we decided that it needed a bit of justification for the genre switch, as turning comedic suddenly might ruin it and lose the audience. Therefore we slowly drip fed our audience comedic moments, and we slowly built up how close together they were and how absurd they were. In our final piece we do not intend to include any comedy whatsoever, so it was nice to try out this genre, and explore its possibilities while we could.
The following fight was the hardest fight yet, as it required the highest physical endurance from both actors. The knife at the start of the fight broke several times, until by the end there was only half a blade. It was not a real knife, of course, but a fake, poundland knife that was obviously going to break very easily. We should probably have thought that through beforehand. The fight didn't turn out nearly as well as we had hoped, as we could never film the fight all the way through with no mistakes, due to its complexity. This meant that in the editing process it was hard to link, so we had to use the jenga sequence as a cutaway. Another problem that we encountered with this sequence was that the acting went slightly downhill. The characters moved too slowly, a lot of their punches looked to fake, and the reactions to the punches were delayed. This took a lot of editing to get around and to make it look decent. I used cutaways downstairs a few times to get around unusable areas.
I think the next scene is one of my favourites in the film. I think that the comedy works really well, especially with the use of the Russian national anthem, that goes away as soon as the antagonists get shot on the stairs. We had to shoot this a few times (no pun intended), as it took a fair amount of commitment and trust to fall down the stairs onto each other. The shots of Agent Davidson walking down the stairs are the only shots in the film that involved a tripod, as our entire film crew had just been shot on the stairwell.
The kitchen fight was definitely our most creative fight sequence, but also our most dangerous. Seeming as it involved using kitchen tools that could cause injury, we shot this scene in parts. Unfortunately this affected continuity, and sometimes it looks a little disjointed, however it is never too much of an issue. I am particularly proud of the part where Agent Davidson picks up the meat forks and uses them as 'claws', as this looks very cool, and is just the sort of idea that would be used in professional action movies. I also love the shot where we placed the camera on the trolley as it was thrown across the room, and I think this is a very creative shot.
Finally we come to our dialogue sequence. For this we wanted some very mysterious lighting, and I like the way that Agent Davidson is backlit in a silhouette, but also holds the torch. It looks very mysterious, and frames him in what is sometimes known as a 'hero shot'. The professor is lit very naturally by Davidson's torchlight, so the audience only sees what the protagonist sees. However this low lighting mixed with the non-HD format resulted in lines moving across the screen which is annoying, but it's only a minor issue.
The finale was relatively easy to shoot, as we were used to fight sequences by then, so it only took about ten minutes to choreograph.What made it hard was the level of endurance required. It was extremely hot in a monkey suit and a balaclava, and so we couldn't run it through as many times as we would of liked, simply because of how much hard work it was. We were all very tired at this point, and we needed to shoot it within the hour. Fortunately, in that time we managed to get most of the shots that we wanted, and there were no major continuity errors that we needed to sort out in post. I was worried that there was a lack of shots, but when it came to editing, it turned out that it was fine. Strangely, when I exported the sequence the music had slightly adjusted itself so it wasn't how I wanted, but I didn't mind too much, and I couldn't find a way to fix it.
In conclusion I think that our preliminary task was a big success, as we demonstrated a keen understanding of the film makign process, and we did it creatively. Our major criticism was the length of it, as none of the others exceeded even half its length, but I don't think it's an issue, as we did what we wanted, and we tested out a lot of things that would be vital in the success of our final piece.
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