Week 5 Journal

Tuesday 30^th January with DAN

We kick off the week with another special guest Q and A lecture with Eilam Hoffman, a sound professional in film, video games and television. Like the previous Q and A’s, Dan skyped Hoffman so we can ask him questions. As last time we focused on Mark Day with his expertise in editing, we saw Hoffman talking to us about working in the sound department, when I had a gander of his IMDB page he has been involved in many projects including my personal favourite “Call of Duty WWII” which was an absolute shocker when I found out he worked on such as popular video game that I adore, it was also great to hear his side and has given me an idea of what working in the sound department of the media is like.  I love these lectures as this helps me decide and give me ideas of what department that I would like to pursue as a career in the future.

Wednesday 31^st January with TAL

We have started to touch upon previsualisation which means in simple terms “blocking” and thinking of the physical attributes of our film such as storyboards, floor plans etc. In this session we had to take photographs of what we want our films to look like, it was nice to be able to physically see what you want in your film and visualise what the set will appear like when we finally shoot our final film soon. I was able to grab some photos of what I want my set to roughly look like and put them on BC. After the break we watched ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ which stared Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as a vampire couple who struggle to survive in the modern day with blood being infected and being in desperate need for clean blood. To be honest I didn’t really enjoy the movie which is a first in this course, I just was not engaged with the story at all as barely anything exciting happened, the characters were unlikeable and were flat out boring and just in general it made me want to go to sleep, it was not just myself that didn’t like this movie, some of my peers also hated it for the same reason.

Thursday 1^st February with DAN

This was the official start of the previs section of the unit. Dan gave us an introduction of previs and what it consists of. Previs consists of the following:

2D Conceptual Artwork

Photography

Test Shooting

2D Hand drawn Storyboards

3D Storyboard

3D Animated Storyboards (Animatics)

These are all methods of previsualisation as is able to help us create a vision for our movies, this is able to help us picture what the set should look like, character appearances and an idea of how to shoot the movie. This gave me ideas of how I can visualise my film and I will put that into practice soon.

Friday 2^nd February with ERICA

Another week almost gone and another film to watch. Today we watched “Shadow of the Empire” which was a creative take on the production behind one of the most famous horror films of all time ‘Nosferatu’. The film stars John Malkovich as F.W. Murnau the director, and Willem Dafoe as the vampire Max Schreck / Count Orlok. This was an interesting film to watch especially Dafoe’s performance which is outstanding and the films aesthetics, this was definitely a better vampire film compared to Only Lovers Left Alive.