A more more more better Buckets of Dead Friends

I uploaded a new version of BODF because there was a little error and it was annoying, so now it's there at the top of the page for all to see.

Evaluation Part 3

In this final part, we discuss:

• more on how we attracted the audience
• what we learnt about the technology used
• what we feel we have learnt in the progression from our preliminary to the full product

Evaluation Part 2

In this part we discuss:

• how our media product represents particular social groups
• what kind of media institution might distribute our media product and what audience would enjoy the product
• how we attracted out audience

Evaluation Part 1

In this first part we discuss in what ways our media product uses, develops or challenges forms and conventions of real media products, i.e. things like conventions of film openings and generic conventions.

A Spanish Buckets of Dead Friends

Well here is the revised edition of Buckets of Dead Friends, based on feedback about the dubbing. All of the lines in the action sequence are now in Spanish to create more of a contrast, and the dubbing in the start has been improved as well as the volume of some things such as music which were a little intermittent in the last version. Other than that, everything else is the same.

Mo' Better Buckets of Dead Friends.

We are improving on the second draft (shown in the last post). One thing that we got a lot as feedback, was that the dileberate bad dubbing we did didn't seem so dileberate, as people missed the jokes (possibly because the non-mexicany scene was accidently badly dubbed, so there was no contrast) so to rectify this, we have decided to re-dub the start (which we had to do because the sound recording on the raw footage wasn't great) and to make the contrast more obvious we are dubbing the scenes in the shoot out in spanish, and putting English subtitles over the bottom of the screen.

(A better) Buckets of Dead Friends

This is a new and improved (though virtually identical) version of Buckets of Dead Friends, with added/revised effects, music, 'humourous' dubbing, and a completely brand new start and end section involving new dialogue and a couple of institutions.

We might need to revise the dubbing though as some people said it just looked bad instead of intentionally bad as we were trying to make it like how most old foreign films that were dubbed i.e. terribly.

Trailer or Opening?: the big debate

The first draft of BODF is most definatley a film opening, it uses enigma codes and doesn't give much plot away, but does introduce the main character, Lucifer Rasmussen jr.

Also it uses an Establishing Shot (in our case, a midshot) and the final version will have music to set the modd and will have titles. Despite not being finished, it does set up engima codes about why Lucifer can affect reality in the way that he can.

au revoir xx

Things we need to ch-ch-ch-change

ON THE FIRST DRAFT we need to change:

We need to make the narrative clearer, we will cut down on the opening because the peice is too long anyway, and we feel we need to represnt the characters in a clear way and to make the narrative more obvious to the audience.

One peice of feedback we got from alot of people we showed the first draft is they did not understand why the girl in it was even in it. Originally it was intended to be a genre parody/reference as we observed that in films like Desperado and other mexico-based westerns there is often a spanish bar maid type character who bolts out of the scene before he shoot out starts. However, this did not translate as well as we thought it would and will lend us a little more time if we removed it.

Secondly, the bandana-wearing Mexican in the RED shirt's death scene needs to be reshot as the senorita character is no longer there to clobber him with the frying pan.

Also, we are going to add in some titles, and institutions.

ta ta for now
xx

DRAFT

Finally the draft for Buckets of Dead Friends is complete-ish.



There's no music or titles yet, but they'll soon be sorted, PLUS we're going to refilm some stuff to keep the length down and make the narrative into a more continuous thing rather than the short film it is now. We also need to add titles and a prodcution company or two, but this is the edited footage as it stands.

Some feedback that we received when I posted this on Facebook (which I shall now answer) was:

• It seems a bit 'choppy'
  Yes indeed, it does seem a bit choppy, a thing I did notice until having rendered it and playing back at full speed, seeing as Sony Vegas wouldn't play it properly as the file was so huge. I believe this is down to the Film Effect which I applied to the footage, and that there was also several unnecessarily long pauses and bad transitions from shot to shot. 
• I cut myself short about 20 secs in
  The whole line was supposed to be said, but to save time I made it so Carlos (played by Aidan) interrupted Lucifer (me). But I obviously forgot about making it smoother in favour of blowing stuff up.
• Make the headsplosion more believable i.e. like the one I did before
  I will do so, involving some neck gore and other stuff.

That was all of the main feedback so far, though other than that, the general feeling was 'LMAO!!! owain thats sick! i love it :p', to quote one source.

Da Editing

We are editing Buckets of Dead Friends via the magic of Sony Vegas and Adobe After Effects. One thing has done using Vegas is colour correct the vaguely mexican scenes, because we didn't have time to build the set out of cardboard, we decided to change the colour of the scene and the lighting to add a browner, more shadowy mise-en-scene which did the job better than all that cardboard would have done any. However, this process was far more painstaking and irritating but does look more effecttive, and translates what we going for in terms of the feel of the piece pretty well.

We've also used After Effects to remove various appendages and add blood flying from wounds, we did this in a diliberatley over the top manner, to convey the genre of surreal black comedy.

Also, this is how we did one such death.

A few things what we have been doing and that.

Here's some shots that were edited to be all gory and such, they're not colour corrected and still need to be cut to match the pace of the opening, but you can still tell what they'd basically look like.






It doesn't matter that neither of these things would happen in real life because real life's boring and exploing heads are hilarious, as feedback we have received has unanimously shown.

Filming Plans

We are going to start filming t'film opening this weekend. We're filming at Owain Anderson's house and it will be mad skillz. We are going to have to get certain members of the cast to double up as certain people are useless and can't make it.

Storyboard

Here is our insanely long storyboard.

Buckets Of Dead Friends Storyboard

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It should be mentioned that Aidan wrote all the following stuff by the way, just so I don't go stealing credit and all that.


There are direct links between the stuff we used for research and our finished storyboard:

The shots of the standoff between Carlos and Lucifer, is a direct link to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and other Sergio Leone Spaghetti Wesetern films, which popularised the type of shot.

The sideways on tracking shot of Lucifer running across the table and firing the bananas is a spoof of the shot in Desperado in which Antonio Banderas runs across the table firing two pistols, with a similar style of shot. The whole scene is in someway influenced by Desperado.

The shot in which Lucifer shoots through one man's head to hit another is inspired by, if not a full recreation of, a shot from Wanted. However in Wanted the shot is a tracking shot (similar to the table running and shooting shot in this) and in ours it is a stationary long shot followed by a closed of the second man being hit.

Other elements of the storyboard are not direct references but are inspired by generic conventions of the "action" genre. For example, the midshot of the senorita winking after smacking a man with a frying pan is a convention that we lifted from action films, as there is often a humorous ending to action sequences.

 

Test Effects

In this post I will add effects that I have been testing. They're not perfect but will be more realistic in the final piece.

1. Head Explosion



I need to darken the neck gore and make the blood more realistic, but besides that there isn't really much to change in my opinion, though that may be wrong so say so if something looks lame.

MUSIC FOR BUCKETS OF DEAD FRIENDS

We decided for Buckets of Dead Friends to create our own music, possibly via guitar skillz but most likely via Mixcraft. The main influence on the style of music, will be the kinda stuff used in Spaghetti Westerns, the like of which Ennio Morricone and such like used to do. Also, the music that Robert Rodriguez wrote for Grindhouse, and the music of the fictional band Rudi and Spider (of The Mighty Boosh fame) will be an influence. We are getting our mate Joe Cooper to score Buckets of Dead Friends as he has some degree of musical ability unlike us.

Misce-en-Scene Inspiration Chitchat

This is a clip from The Mighty Boosh Episode "The Priest and the Beast". I popped this on the the blog because we were discussing that the mexican bar scene is a perfect representation of the kind of mise-en-scene we are trying to emulate. It is also made on fairly low budget with the "obviously fake" vibe we ere going for and contains similar styles of surrealism and humour.

Shot List

These are the shots that we are going to film:


Close-up (x 18)
Midshot (x 38)
Over The Shouldaz (x 3)
Dutch Angles (x 2)
Extreme Close Up (x 2)
Trackin' Shotz ( x 2)
and thats all folks

Storyboard

This is the storyboard, I may upload a better version in future.

The Script.

Here's the script for Buckets of Dead Friends' action-packed opening scene, it may be subject to change, but we'll change that as we come to it.

Buckets Of Dead Friends

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MACHETE

(WARNING: BRIEF NUDITY AT ABOUT 1:40 IN)



Yes. This is what I'm talking about. Robert Rodriguez is famous for making films that like this, have very stylistic violence and a particular 'south-of-the-border' style and this film is a great example of the ridiculous 'pedal to the metal' violence that we're looking to put in our film opening as, after all, the opening is a homage to Robert Rodriguez's films themselves. I have ran out of idioms to describe this awesome piece of film.

I'm getting (mood) bored.

This is our mood board. It sums up the general vibe of the piece of cinematic joy. The images from Robert Rodriguez movies are particularly significant to the opening to Buckets of Dead Friends, as his films (particlarly El Mariachi, Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico) were a major influence on the imaginary fight scene portrayed. Also, Machete is in there for the genral aged film/ grindhousey vibe going on which we will attempt recreate in the fantasy fight scene.

The Inglourious Basterds shot is in there for two reasons A) We both love Quentin Tarantino, quite frankly, he is the man. He's one of our favourite directors of all time and it was him that inspired me (Aidan) to make films. B) We love that specific movie, and have included a scalping into buckets of dead friends.

We have included shots of Michele Gondry flicks coz we dig his homemade style (particuarly relevent in the shot from Stephane TV in Science of Sleep) something we hope to emulate in our finished product.

We have also included a few nerdy lookin' geezers coz we are using the nerd stereotype to create our central character.

Numbnutz Films

I was mucking around on Adobe After Effects and made a ident/logo to go at the start of the film, it would probably be preceded by a real film company.

CAST LIST

Here is a comprehensive list of the astonshing A-list actors we have in our lil' piece.

Lucifer Rasmussen JR- played by Owain Anderson
Carlos C. Carlos- Aidan Barker-Dean III
Senorita- Maz Haynes
Mexican henchmenz - James Bale, Joe Danaher, Josh Ingham and Andre Martinz

:)

Bit mo' about inspiration

Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas

Clip one:(Opening Scene)

Fear And Loathing - Watch today’s top amazing videos here



Clip Two (Hotel/ Reptiles):


The element of this particular film that inspired me was the fact that the setting is represented as being half realistic and half in the character's minds, this is a direction that I would very much like to experiment with, it is intriguing to think how to manipulate misce-en-scene to represent character's imiginations.  Also I like the home-made un flashy effects, typical of terry gilliam films.

The Opening Scene is effective as it represents the charaters, Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo, very clearly through use of Dialouge, Narration (from Duke) and camera angels.  The closeups on Duke's face are often filmed on a slightly askew angle, representing him as different or weird.  This is (as we discover) because he has consumed epic ammounts of illegal narcotics.  Also, we see that other characters, i.e. the Hitcher in this particular clip, and the hotel check in woman in clip two, respond to the duo in a bemused kind of way, which helps to further represent them as "different" to the audience.

Our Pitch

Our Pitch

Here is our pitch for our media opening, it basically explains eeeverything you need to know to kinda understand where we're coming from.

Desperado Bar Scene

This is a major inspiration for the main bulk of the opening, the violence, characters and setting are all elements that we are going to try and replicate, albeit on a smaller scale.

Inspiration for Practical

The first film opening that has inspired me is The Science of Sleep from 2006, directed by Michel Gondry.



I think that the opening to this film is good as it immediately gives you an idea of the main premise. The main character Stephane is represented as likeable,as well as highly imaginative. This is shown through many ways, for instance, the camera constanstly follows him as he ducks and dives and runs around the room, as if he is important and we should care about what he has to say. It also helps as he is shown as the presenter of his own imaginary tv show. The setting, a room entirely furnished in egg boxes and cardboard, demonstrates his creative side as he has created the entire scene in his head. The music used is supposedly played by Stephane himself, which again highlights his creative side. The audience is positioned to like Stephane from the off, through the way that he acts and talks, as well as because of his creative passion.