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.