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.