Racist superhero idea

So there's this guy in the KKK who lives in a town overrun by African American gangs. Incensed, he turns into a superhero who takes the fight to them: to the Ghetto.

He'd call himself the Ghettoblaster.

I thought that was the funniest thing in the world, until I found that there's actually a movie by that name (and similar circumstances).

Best ad idea, ever

There's a place, presumably a bank, with long queues. Lots of people from all cultures are standing around, waiting. There's a ping noise which alerts a person to move from the queues to the coveted tellers. An asian couple sigh in unison, heavily, as a tall german checks his watch.

Then, out of nowhere, two islamic terrorists run in with bombs tied to their bodies, carrying swords, with a trigger in one hand, and a pistol in the other. One of them addresses the customers(T1), whilst the other addresses the tellers(T2). They talk simultaneously, but T1 is in focus.

T1: Everyone on the floor, or you will all die!
T2: We are attached to bombs, and they can go through your blast shields. Try anything funny and we all go up in flames.

The german calmly positions himself closer to T1, puts his hands behind his head, and gets down.

T2: I want you to put all of the money from the safes into bags and bring them out here.
Teller: (Nods head)

At this moment, everything goes into slow motion. The German gets up and in one move, pulls out T1's sword. In another, cuts off his head. We get a shot as the head slowly falls towards the ground, and in the background you can see T2 turn around, slowly. The German kicks the head towards T2, and T2 drops both the pistol and the trigger and lunges towards the head, hoping to catch it. A slow motion shot as the head brushes T2's fingers but gets flung past, hitting the wall behind the teller, leaving a large spatter of blood.

T2 falls to the ground, shattered. His plan in ruins. Everyone gets to their feet, and stare in awe and shock at the German, who himself is unsure what happened. The teller looks behind her at the blood spatter, then at the German, and yells:

Teller: "GOAAAAAALLLLLL GOALGOALGOALGOALGOALLLLL!!!!"

Everyone starts cheering and the german puts his shirt over his head and starts running around. Shot outside the bank, which has a title "World Bank", and a voiceover:

v/o: The world game -- Fifa 2006 Germany.

Blazing Balloons: Chapter 1

Quentin has a nightmare where he is incredibly scared of death. Death notices Quentin has wet himself, and starts laughing at him. With no time to ponder such bad dreams, Quentin wakes to discover the woman he's presumably slept with last night. She's rather more masculine than he remembers. She calls herself Cindi.

Quentin starts referring to Cindi as "mommy", and Cindi gets frustrated and leaves. He looks at the calendar and notices that today is the day he must "get Watson". As he's getting breakfast from the fridge he notices the post-it reminding him to take the keys and batteries.

He gets to Watson's townhouse after getting a friendly call from Kurt, his superior, informing him that his employment will be terminated if he does not bring Watson in today. He's clearly angry that Quentin "doesn't smell like team spirit". Desperate, Quentin offers Watson 30 quid and a AA battery, to which Watson agrees.

On the way out, Watson and Quentin are surrounded by blue collar workers on a strike, and agree to sign their petition. Spurred on by their act, Imogen calls them up to the podium and thanks them personally. At this point, a Delorean filled with screaming men of middle-eastern origin comes and crashes into the podium, hitting Quentin. They race inside the company shooting wildly. At this point, the heroes notice a beeping sound coming from the Delorean. When they go to investigate, the beeping hastens and the bomb in the Delorean explodes, albeit with a fizzle...

The Brazier Postmortem

The Brazier postmortem is on quaddmg, but is probably more appropriate here:

Intro:

This was good, unarguably the best part. The stark red text matches well with the music, and it's synchronised too. It may not be truly representative of the intended subject matter, but I think that works for it rather than against, and the "it really stinks" is a fair warning.

Main:

Audio:

I think the lack of background music hurts. Even something ambient would've worked. The other thing is it blocks out background noise, so changes in the audio samples are less noticeable. The lack of coherence is noticeable. The audio doesn't flow well at all. The reason is basically because it didn't flow. We recorded it one bit at a time, so it's amazing it came together as well as it did. If you only listen to it(without watching), then you can only notice a couple of inconsistencies(acting inconsistencies aside, as well as the missing scenes). This is absolutely amazing. The interjection of Harpreet by Michael didn't work too well, but it wasn't horrible.

Colour/Exposure/Aperture:

We left all the settings on auto. We probably should have shot each camera angle by ensuring the same exposure and white balance, and adjusted it as the day went on. The aperture should have been as big as possible, to ensure clear pictures of people's heads. Overall this wasn't horrible but still noticeable. Some camera angles are exposed more than others, so the shifting of camera angles looks inconsistent. Namely the semi-outdoor shots(the ones near Michael, Harpreet, and me) looked different to the ones of Nathan and Tim. Worse, since Tim was in the shot with Michael in it, then AGAIN in Nathan's shot, he changes colour abruptly. Not good.

Lighting:

The worst. We're all lit directly from above, with very little diffuse lighting. There's backlighting coming in the window, but none on the other side. This means everyone is lit unevenly, and there are shadows pointing down. On top of that, there's a fluorescent light there as well, which is providing pretty good diffuse lighting. This means the shadows are a light blue colour. This looks really dodgy. On top of that the 2 colours are used to white balance the cameras differently in different angles. Diffuse lighting provided by the sun in the morning is the best kind. If we can afford to(and have time), getting a white umbrella and sticking a 100W globe thingy at the front of it works well.

Composition:

I think it was pretty much a given that we went overboard with the camera angles. We pretty much knew this before we shot. There's a bit where PC1 is speaking, the camera angle changes, and PC1 is still speaking. Clearly this looks stupid. One thing we did right was the static camera angles. Lesson learnt: Only move the camera if the subject is moving. We were all sitting there, so the camera should sit there. Simple as that. Note the subject doesn't have to be a human subject, or even a physical subject. The "action" or "drama" could be moving. Rotating/Panning would've been good, for example, if we're introducing the characters. They have to be doing something though, and "passing the action" along to the next person. For example speaking, and the person next to them answers. You can pan in a way that this works. Anyway, that's difficult, and it's good that we didn't move the cameras.

The camera angles that worked were where all the subjects were involved. When PC2 and PC3 are talking to PC1 (off camera), that looks "right". Also, when PC1 is talking to the DM, that also looks appropriate. There are even camera angles where one person is talking, and the expression of the other person is important, so that looks appropriate. However, if you change the camera angle so that you go from A->B, and the person in A is also in B, then it looks "wrong". Two adjacent camera angles must have an entirely different set of subjects. Also, in general, the total number of subjects must be greater than or equal to the number of camera angles. The exception to this is in action shots, but action shots are difficult, and you have to be careful. You can't switch characters in action shots(for example one camera angle on one side, then another angle on the other side. It confuses people. That's all I know about action shots for now.

Editing:

I was reading a bit about jump cuts and jarring edits. Everyone kinda knows about not crossing the stage line, having establishing shots, and keeping the eye focus on the subject(ie: whenever cutting, make sure the subject is on the same part of the screen, even if it's a different subject). Other things like matching eyelines are also important. This can be seen at work(or rather, non-work) in the brazier. The most comfortable edits are the ones where these rules are followed. We also never took a single cutaway or establishing shot. Gotta remember to do that. The handover in the beginning("inscribed in the pedestal you find the following words") is totally comfortable. This is part timing, and part following the rules. The next cut(to PC2 and PC3) is totally jarring, because we've never seen them before, and they seem to pop out of nowhere. This is also crossing the stage line, as well and moving eye focus to the other side of the screen. The next cut doesn't have matching eyelines(or lighting), etc. etc.

The amazing thing is how well waldorf's works in contrast. This is partly just luck, but things like "handovers"(Tim walking in after picking up the "raw materials") work really well. Establishing shots are also generally non-jarring, since they get a person used to an entire scene. A lot of the cuts tend to be to establishing shots, and the jarring cuts are really there for comic effect(me being replaced by nathan in the car). The "satan" cutaway totally works, despite the fact that it's supposed to be jarring, it actually does help the flow of the main storyline.
Misc:

Let's make this absolutely clear... don't eat the props. Shooting entire scenes is better than shooting bits at a time. We need to develop a flow. It makes the acting better. We should also try having 2 people dedicated to the task of direction and camerawork. This is important during the filming process.

Ending:

Using courier as the scrolly font is a bad idea. Something like times is more appropriate. Also, the size is way too large, and the scrolling speed a tad too high. The music is synchronised brilliantly again. The "copyright" bit is genius. The music is great, but it's evangelion, so of course it's great.

Fwoosh postmortem

"I did a fwoosh postmortem already, didn't I", I kept thinking, but upon checking, it became apparent that indeed I had not yet completed the postmortem for our latest, perhaps greatest production. Because it was done by me (and not Tim), and I'm doing the postmortem as well, some may think I'm being biased, since "the production we shall not name" is shown to be total crap and this "fwoosh" postmortem is glowing with praise. This, of course, is patently false, and anyone who claims otherwise is a dirty rotten scoundrel.

So let's begin by saying that a lot of what we learnt was in fact from "the production we shall not name", and these same mistakes were largely avoided. Taking care in these areas, of course, left problems in other areas, which is what will be discussed here.

What we did right

Listening to my advice from "the production we shall not name", payed off, since the problems encountered in that production did not occur. The production was made with a view to remove a lot of the variables. Black and white with no sound made it easy to concentrate on story and lighting. Not that everything should be black and white and have no sound, but things like colour balance were never even brought up as issues. We could talk it out and give direction as we were filming, and since the film was going to be sped up, there was little problems with short time stuffups.

The main achievement of the piece was that lighting was carefully considered. Manual exposure settings, even without light metering, worked well to give relatively even lighting throughout the piece (one exception which we'll discuss later). The focus was auto, but that wasn't such a bad thing, since we weren't shooting anything wacky focus-wise anyway. Indoor scenes were illuminated with plenty of lighting, and outdoor scenes had different exposure settings. If anything bad could be said for it, it was that we filmed in the middle of the day, a bad time for shadows, and it shows.

You know that the action is well carried when glaring irregularities go unnoticed. Everyone watching (except us) didn't seem to realise that the car changed sides or that Nathan got in the passenger side and ended up on the driver side. This is because the action was well written and carefully carried. Point of action was not abruptly moving around, lighting didn't change between shots, and sequential shooting meant only the things that were meant to go wrong went wrong. We stopped the script from getting too specific to allow us to take full advantage of opportunities that came by. The handshake and the car bit was pretty much made up on the spot.

Establishing shots. There was just one, but it was enough to give the viewer spacial awareness of the entire piece. There were no cutaways, but that didn't really matter, because our improvised cutaways worked well. Enough said about that.

What we did wrong

The time of day (and the resulting shadows) have already been mentioned. We should've waited for better lighting, but I don't mind so much, and we don't have those giant mirror thingies, so it can be excused. The thing that we did really wrong was that we shouldn't have done mixed indoor / outdoor shots. Not only did we have the character moving from indoors to outdoors, but we have him actually going outside from the inside, which is a mistake, especially considering the time of day. To make things worse, my pergola provided sufficient shade to make the establishing shot confusing, and make the lighting confusing (even though the lighting was even, one shot was in shadow and one was not).

A minor problem, but we shouldn't have been so stingy on takes. Everything was done in one or two takes. This was great for the most part, but it made mixing stuff up hard. The appearing broom shot is... let's say you can tell. Still, it wasn't hard, and improvising in post is what made it funny, in some ways.

Another minor issue is that we need someone saying cut before leaving character. Specifically, there's this bit where Michael "dies", but gets up immediately after hitting the ground. This makes the shot really hard to work with in post, since it's sped up. Nathan just stays in character ad infinitum.

For something that small, post was difficult, time consuming, and HDD space consuming. We need to figure out a workflow, and either split up future projects between people or do something to make stuff more manageable (rough cuts at one person's house, then split up clean cuts, etc). I ended up repeatedly re-rendering stuff, because of problems that kept cropping up. Anyway, that's a lesson for another day.

That's it. The placecard effect didn't look too great because it wasn't jiggling around. I don't know what lessons can be learnt from that though.

Synopsis - IN CAPS

AKUMA STEALS EMPEROR’S DAGGER FROM LOTUS BLOSSOM. HE INTENDS ON USING IT TO KILL LOTUS, WHO KILLED AKUMA’S FATHER WITH SAID DAGGER WHILE DOING NINJA POLICE WORK. AFTER ATTEMPTING TO GET IT BACK, AND BARELY ESCAPING WITH HER LIFE, SHE SEEKS OUT HER OLD MASTER TO COMPLETE HER TRAINING. STUFF HAPPENS, TRAINING IS COMPLETED. LOTUS CONFRONTS AKUMA AND DEFEATS HIM, ONLY TO LEARN THAT MISTER SABBATH IS THE REAL BRAINS BEHIND THE PLOT, AND THAT HE IS THE ONE THAT SPURRED AKUMA TO REVENGE. AKUMA THEN DIES FROM HIS WOUNDS. LOTUS SEEKS SABBATH OUT AND CONFRONTS HIM, ONLY TO LEARN THAT HE IS HER FATHER! AKUMA TURNS OUT TO NOT BE DEAD AFTER ALL, AND WHEN LOTUS SEEMS TO BE DEFEATED, HE SHOWS UP AND HELPS HER BEAT SABBATH. THE END.

so.... do you come here often?

Nathan, could you please add the synopsis of the project (everything you've done so far), so that we can get some comments and things going. Maybe we should set up some sort of wiki or something...