Web Design

Here is the web design I made.

Auditions 1

On Saturday we had the first set of auditions. Two actors showed up and I was responsible for filming their auditions.

Commercial Shoot

On Friday, Jared, Cassie, Jacob, Potter and I shot the commercial at the Astin Manision. I was responsible for directing photography (lighting and camera) work. We got some more help from the enthusiastic German intern/exchange student Lorenz Meyer.

We shot the footage on Canon 5D, and I got a chance to work with the Glidecam from the lab. Although I was not able to get the footage as steady as I had planned for, it was much better and smoother than hand-held or on mono-pod.

Next I'll be working with Tyler to do the post-production work on the footage. Including motion tracking and stabilization, color correction and grading and CG text compositing.

Steadycam

This one seems like the most efficient way to do it.

Mel Brooks

Robinhood Men in Tights

Spaceballs

Unable to embed

We could probably do that gag at 2:19

Dracula: Dead and Loving It!

Dracula introduction scene - at 0:35 Mr Knight's introduction scene could draw something from there.

Quick Shot Tests

Jared, Cassie and I went to the mansion to get some test shots. Cassie shot pictures of all the rooms.

Meanwhile, I shot some mock footage. Most of these shots I have stabilized in post. Also looks like we'll need lot more light than expected if we want to shoot at the night. These test clips were shot at f2.8 at 6400 ISO on the 5D. Ideally we would want to shoot these somewhere around f7.1 at around 100 ISO on the 5D, otherwise the footage will be too noisy.

Projector Setup Shot

Slow dolly in for the projector to start playing, then we dolly into the projected image.

Knight walks in - steady-cam shot

Steady cam tracking as Mr Knight is escorted by the butler into the dining room.

Rosemary Death

Murderer switching weapons, before he strikes Rosemary in the head. She then collapses and falls off the balcony. Murderer hands her the reel just before she falls. Last part of this shot will be in slow-motion.

Lighting Reference: King's Speech

This movie has overall very soft light, and soft shadows. The color correction is more natural and not overly saturated or warm. We can achieve such soft lights and shadows with paper lanterns.

Script Draft 1

The whole interstitial group met over the weekend for several hours and worked on the script. We drafted the entire script, you can view it as a Google Doc or download it as a PDF.

Illustration Style

Here are a few ideas for poster illustrations I made. My idea is to make minimal illustrations of the deaths and interesting moments from the interstitials. We can make 4 posters, Howards death with the baguette, Rosemary's death on the floor, Knight's death with the stake and maybe one poster of the Butler with the mask.

Costume Inspiration

Shooting Schedules

Jared and I developed a detailed schedule for the entire shoot (interstitial and commercial) with pre-production and post-production planning.

Location Scouting - Astin Mansion, Bryan

Jared, Brian and I went to check out Astin Mansion in Bryan. The mansion seems like it would lend itself very well for the piece. It has some decent usable furniture and they've agreed to let us move things around as we need. We can use the space on T/W/TR and Sundays.

We still need to figure out how many lights we'll be using and estimate the total power consumption and make sure their setup can handle it. If not we might have to rent out a generator and buy/borrow a few heavy duty extension cables.

Here are a few quick shots of the mansion.

Front entrance

Dining Hall 1, Pale blue interiors, easier to light up.

Dining Hall 2, might be better for closeup shots, dark wooden interiors might make it work very well for us.

There are a lot of interesting fire-places throughout the mansion.

The rear of the mansion is far more creepier, and has a drive way.

Character Designs

Web design inspiration

forefathersgroup.com Vintage meets modern design - classy, period savvy and fun.

aboard-entrepreneurship.com/ - another clean, elegant retro design.

Here's a post on Retro Style in Web Design.

Here's a guide to make retro web design, it's a bit trivialized but seems like a good place to start

Here's a collection of 1920s style fonts.

More lighting references

Mad Men has excellent lighting and layout. Notice the lighting template - soft and bright key, hard high-angle rim and very little fill. Even on moderately high-key environments they pull off to make the characters look mysterious by letting generous amounts of shadows creep on the side of the faces, all while maintaining good detail and definition in the shadow regions and the eyes.

Another important thing to consider is luminance. The interstitials will be surrounded by bright and saturated student animations, so we need to have high contrast and brightness in the interstitial videos. This will help the viewers eye gets a clean read of the set and characters within the limited amount of time available for establishing shots. Good examples of this are movie trailers, where the contrast is slightly bumped up to make them gel better with the brighter titles in between.

Characters & Rough Script

Very proud of our eight hours long meeting with the interstitial group! Here are character descriptions and a rough script. We're still working on this, and you can see the latest version on our Google Doc.

Characters

The Professor

• A short, bearded bald man in his mid 40s 
• Professor of some kind of advanced science at Yale 
• Works in a field of science related to military, weapons 
• Clumsy; overly knowledgeable but socially very awkward 

Ex-Military Woman

• German military woman in her late 20s 
• Very attractive woman with a heavy German accent 
• Years of military training has made her a hard-ass 
• Interested in the Professor to steal information on weapon development 

Art Student

• Pale white man in his mid 20s 
• Interested in art, music and history 
• Suave, cultured and educated 
• He's attracted to the Ex-military woman 

Teenage Girl

• Teeny bopper in her late teens 
• Was expelled from Yale because of some misunderstanding involving the Professor 
• Chatty, petty and immature 
• She has a big crush on the Art Student 

The Host

• A tall white man in his mid 40s 
• Speaks in a deep demonic voice 

The Butler

• Slithering and mysterious, silent and sneaky Jack! 

Interstitials

Interstitial #1

• Ext. sunset/night Elaborate and cinematic intro with long establishing shots that set the mood and the environment; Perhaps we follow a car on the road as it enters the gates of a rich Victorian mansion; 
• Int. mansion (dining room); the room is lit warmly by a giant chandelier above the dining table; we see four frantic characters seated at the table. The four characters are -- the Professor, the Ex-Military Woman, the Teenage girl and the Art student; They are unaware as to who invited them here, and why they are here; 
• As the chatter continues, the Host enters. He takes the head seat at the table and addresses everyone; He presents everyone a gift on a platter. 
• Camera slowly dollys across the table as the guests open the platter to reveal their gifts; Everyone opens their platter one by one and realizes that they have been handed murder weapons (e.g. pistol, knife, rope, fork, loaf of bread etc). 
• Everyone is confused, and looks at one another; reaction shots 
• The host calms them down and begins to explain 
• As he starts explaining the lights suddenly go off. A loud grunt is heard; Lights come back and the Host is found dead at the table. His face is straight down on his platter. 
• Everyone is frantic; they scream; 
• The light from the thunderstorm outside suddenly reveals the mysterious Butler who is now standing beside the dead body of the Host. The Butler sets up a film projector on the table. 
• The group opens the platter under the Host’s dead body; They find a film reel under the Host's body. They retrieve the reel and clumsily let the dead body fall flat on the table; The reel can is embossed with the Viz Logo; 
• They put the reel into the film projector and precede to play it. An old countdown comes up as the camera zooms into the film and fades into HD quality video displaying student work from The Vizlab. A clue is revealed within the reel, a photo of a room somewhere inside the mansion. 

Interstitial #2

• The reel finishes playing, the camera zooms back out from the film; We are back in the dining room with the guests. 
• The group interprets the clue and head off to find the room shown in the picture they have seen. 
• The guests head down a hallway looking for their destination. The teenage girl is clearly into the Art Student. She keeps trying to approach him and talk to him but he seems enthralled with the Ex-Military Woman and ignores her entirely. 
• She becomes upset and separates herself from the group; She finds her way into a room with a phone in it and precedes to call one of her friends and vent her feelings. 
• Meanwhile behind her a shadow figure approaches. 
• Hand held camera creeps up on the teenage girl; We see a gloved hand holding various weapons, trying to decide which one to use. (Switching weapons similar to a first-person shooter game) 
• We cut back to the group who have just found the next reel in another room. They realize that the teenage girl is missing from the group; They hear a scream and run towards the sound. 
• They find the teenage girl dead in a chair blood running down her face. The Butler walks in with the film projector on a cart and they start up the next film reel. 
• The camera zooms in close to the dead teen’s face/eye and we see the reflection of the reel in it before we cut to see the final countdown as the student work begins. 
• The reel shows another clue, an image of a backpack. 

Interstitial #3

• The reel finishes playing, the camera zooms back out from the film; int. dining room The group realizes that the backpack in the clue was the teen’s backpack. They rush to the living room (??) and empty the backpack to find an envelope. 
• Int. living room In the envelope they find awkward photos of the professor; (Although we never see these pictures, the characters’ behavior suggest that the photos have some nudity/sexuality;) The envelope also has a letter. The Art student starts to read aloud the letter; As he reads the letter, we fade into a black/white still-montage of the Professor’s past; the letter reveals that the professor had relationships with the teenage girl, and that he had a major role in her being expelled from school. 
• After reading the letter, the Art student accuses the professor of murdering the teenage girl; The ex-military woman jumps in the argument to defend the professor; (It is evident that she is trying to win the professor for selfish reasons -- to extract war-weaponry information from him) 
• Tight closeup shot of the Art student as he accuses the professor; medium shot of the professor being clumsy -- he accidents leans over a statue in the room which opens up a secret passage behind the sculpture; Tight closeup of the ex-military woman arguing; Wide shot of the room -- we see that the professor slowly wanders into the secret passage as the other two continue to argue 
• We follow the professor as he wanders into the secret passage; at the end of the passage is a tall stairway; he reaches the top and there he sees a silhouette with a pistol in his hand; The professor trembling with fear walks backwards; He trips and falls down the stairs in an overly dramatic fashion; he continues to walk backwards; he trips over a bear trap on his left foot; he spins around and steps on a rake, which hits him on his face; he trips again and falls on a sword; he realizes that he has a gun in his pocket, he pulls it out and tries to shoot it, but it misfires and shoots his own arm; he looses his arm and blood spurts out; yelling in pain, he continues to walk backward, he trips again and falls out of the window behind him; 
• Int. Living room we see the ex-military woman and the art student still arguing, when we see the professor falling from outside the window. The professor manages to hold on to the window pane and screams, but his screams are not heard through the closed window. He tries to knock on the window but he looses grip and falls down; both the ex-military woman and the art student rush towards the window, but they are too late; they see the professor fall off the window, and down the hill, he rolls and finally falls off the cliff. They all scream; cut on scream to int. dining room; 
• Int. dining room - we see the projector that was playing a blank reel begins to play again, and it makes a few clicking and beeping sounds; cut to living room - As soon as their screams subside, the ex-military woman and the art student hear the clicking and beeping of the projector; they return to the dining room and continue to watch the reel 
• Within the reel they see another clue -- the clue reveals to them where the McGuffin is in the mansion! 

Interstitial #4

• After realizing that neither one of them could be the killer, the Art Student and the Ex-Military Woman decide to put aside their differences and focus on helping each other escape. 
• The clue from the previous reel has led them back to the dining room where they find the McGuffin (What the McGuffin is isn’t important and the audience never finds out what’s been found). 
• As the Art Student discovers the McGuffin, he is impaled from behind with a stake or sword, killing him instantly. 
• As his body crumples to the ground, The Butler is revealed, standing behind him. 
• At this point, The Butler explains his plan to the Ex-Military Woman while they slowly walk around the table in the dining room. They do a full 360 around the table before settling at the positions they started at. 
• The Butler then precedes to pull back a mask revealing himself to be The Host! 
• The final battle commences. There are several stages of the battle involving fist-fighting, karate, guns, and light sabres. 
• Alternate Endings: 
• The Host wins the battle, Ex-Military woman is killed. (what else?) 
• The Ex-Military woman wins the battle, The Host is destroyed. (what else?) 
• After a long and challenging battle The Host and the Ex-Military Woman come to terms. The Host decides to take the Ex-Military Woman under his wing and train her. (more?)

Poster Ideas

Minimal, retro style poster design. The style can also be applied to t-shirt and other media.

Overly cinematic posters, mysterious lighting, and tight close ups of cast members.

Notice in the above image the artificial lighting setup. Spot lights on everyone's faces, makes the poster feel very unnatural and plastic. Might be a good choice if we want it to look and feel very "commercial".

In the above image: more natural lighting, perhaps accomplished with some kinds of large soft boxes. More difficult to achieve but definitely creates a more pleasing look and feel.

Lighting & Set design References

Sherlock Holmes - Lighting, Mood & Color Correction

Notice warm tones created by color correction, no pure whites or colors. Moderately low-key lighting used to create vintage photography mood. Low key setup will work for us better than high-key considering we have access to only a few portable lights at the lab. However, for low-key video we might have to rent out or borrow a better camera than the Lab's T2i (perhaps the 5D if Glen permits)

The Prestige - Lighting, Mood & Color

Similar looking to sherlock holmes, but notice how the lights used in this movie are themselves very warm and not just applied in post processing. Fairly low-key, plenty of atmosphere and volumetric with fog, warm tones to simulate vintage photographs; earthy colored sets; high-contrast and saturation character outfits make them stick out of the background. Generous use of 180 degree dolly shots.

3rd Rock From The Sun - Dial M for Dick

Set design of the mansion. Earthy colored walls and floors, plush furniture, low-hanging large chandeliers. Classic sitcom character silliness and acting.

The Community - Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps

Tasteful silliness in character-setup and acting.