Editing Sound

 To makes the sound of the radio microphones more distorted, I edited Thomas' voice clips that overlay scenes in the woods with Adobe Audition.

To get some static feedback, which is reminiscent of walkie talkies, I went to:

Effects > Special > Distortion

which bought me to a pop up screen that looked like this:

I then clicked and dragged the red and green lines in order to manipulate the pitch and volume, and also accentuate feedback - it was like turning up the sharpness of a low resolution photo, which created static and noise.

Finding Ambience

Due to a poor sound quality due to the fact that there was a technical hitch with the microphones SD cards, ambience sounds were needed to make the film seem more professional.

To achieve this, I went to the website: freesound.org , made an account and looked for sounds with a public domain symbol:

This means that the intellectual property rights of the sounds clips have expired, have been forfeited or are inapplicable.

The ambience clips I used were titled:

• Outdoor forest
• Running refrigerator
• Creepy Piano
• Negative Ambience

The outdoor forest ambience was used, obviously, for the forest scenes, and the running refrigerator diegetics were used for inside the studio. The piano, however, was added at random intervals during the film, similar to how a low budget thriller may uses music to string out the tension. Near the end of the film, the negative ambience was used to create tension as the survivor stared at the phone.

Noise and Grain

Whilst editing, I noticed that the shots taken in the studio environment were grainy due to a lack of light, which caused spots to flicker about the picture like there was dust on the lens. To combat this, I went on to you tube to look for some tutorials about getting rid of the grain.

Here I found an After Effects tutorial that was very useful.

Though the effects were small, I managed to minimize the grain and make the pictures a little cleaner.

2/2 Filming

1/2 Filming

Weather Forecasts

As long as this weather prediction is correct, we won't have to worry about grumpy actors and mud stealing our tripods. Just for the sake of being prepared, I will bring an umbrella.

Hiccups

Sadly our intended actor for the Survivor - Alex - couldn't make the film due to an operation. It was evident we needed a new leading man, so I headed down to the drama department on Thursday to look for more actors. To do this, I described the film opening, the genre, and offered them a memory stick with the copy of the film on it so that they can use it in their port folio.

I managed to get two phone numbers off of potential acotrs (Monty and James), and all that's need now it to arrange a time with he rest of the team to give to them, and see if they can make the filming.

Costumes

SURVIVOR
The costume that the survivor will be wearing shall be simple - a large leather jacket over whatever clothes he has on, and we will paint his face to make it look like he has stubble. He will have a pretend gun and a holster, and maybe a scarf. The point of dressing him simply is to help him blend into his surroundings. He is the main character, so he doesn't want to draw anymore focus.


RADIO HOST
Though the room will be dark and the radio host's face is never seen, his costume will have to make up for his anonymity. The clothes he wears are going to be comfortable, colourful and clean. He is a recluse who lives in a radio station, so it's quite unlikely that he'll be covered in mud. He will be wearing a dressing gown or a hawaiian shirt, and additional bracelets and accessories. Anything bright and childish. However, we ended up asking Thomas to bring in one of his dressing gowns and simply draw focus to his mouth (but never his whole face). The is, after all, the speaker, and should be protrayed thusly and just a voice of reasons (Despite him being insane).

INFECTED GIRL
Due to the fact that we don't want an agitated child on our hands, she will not be wearing as much in regards to costumes. Her make up will draw the attention away from her clothes, and she may wear a hat as well as have fake blood covering her hands and face.

INFECTED MAN
The infected man will be wearing a large coat, and again, he'll be wearing the make up to draw attention away from anything else.

Final Script

During a free period, I took the time to lengthen the script so that we would have more to work with whilst editing. This is the final script that will be handed out to our actors.

[Interior: Radio station. Background music is upbeat]

RH And welcome back to 237 days since the Incident. That’s right, folks. Christmas is just around the corner, so stock up on that delicious canned turkey for the festive season. Or better, we could get together some time. I know you’re all giving me the silent treatment, but—fun. Well you know where I am: Same bat time, same bat channel.  And now for the weather.

[As the radio host is talking, there’ll be crosscutting to the survivor: the polar opposite of the host. Broody. Dangerous. The setting is the woods.]

RH The gamma levels out in sector 2 are a low and pleasant 24, and chances of the sun making an appearance is pretty bleak.

[The transmission can be heard coming from a rucksack. The survivor approaches where the noise is coming from. Opens bag. Find walkie talkie. This is the first voice he’s heard in almost a year.]

RH For you younger listeners, it was the big ball of fire in the sky before we replaced with one of those energy saving do-hickeys. God bless the late, great government. And that’s about all we—

S [Speaking into the walkie talkie] Hello?

RH [Freezes] …And we have our first caller. [Typing, clicking, and trying to find the right security footage to find the survivor] What’s your name, friend? What’s your story?

S [Amusement] You’re crazy. This is crazy.

RH You’re crazy, I’m crazy…How about another one? Can you tell me where the nearest infected is in your local area?

S It’s just me. It’s just me now.

RH Wrong answer. Take a look around and see what you could’ve won.

S What?

RH There’s someone behind you.

S [Tense, already reaching for the gun. The infected behind him has blotchy green skin. Vacant stare. Survivor shoots him]

RH That was violent. Wanna talk about it to our listeners?

S Shut up. [Rummaging through the infected’s pockets; finds photograph of the Infected before the Incident. He’s with his daughter. Looks up and sees the daughter, now infected.]

Meet the Cast

Thomas Williams will be our Radio Host. We chose him because he has an excellent speaking voice and is easily imaginable as an eccentric recluse in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

This is Martin - our leading man who'll play the survivor. He is related to Bradley, a member of our group, and was therefore easily to get a hold of. We chose an older actor because it would make our film look more professional, and he has the look of a survivor. Note: Tattoos

Alexander Dawes is essentially the guy we're going to kill off. We chose him because he is currently studying drama, and would play a convincing survivor well as he's the most highly trained.

Alex's little sister shall be played by Summer, another one of Bradley's relatives. We chose her because he's one of the youngest children we could find (I can assure you that we did not hang around playgrounds, asking for children to star in our movie) and she has a good likeness to Alex.

Make-up

Cheesy, cheesy tutorial

What would our antagonists - the infected people - be without their makeup? Seeing as I had too much free time on my hands, I decided to flicked through some online tutorials and try to replicate the special effects.

First of all, I scraped back the hair from my face with an old motorbike scarf and put on some basic foundaion. This made skin more ven and less greasy when the white facepaint is applied, but adaptations may have to be made whilst doing the actor's makeup outside (And I doubt that the male actors will be happy about wearing blusher.

I then applied the white facepaint for the ghoulish complexion. It's a cheap product and came out patchy when applied with the sponges, but that added to the effect.

As you can seen, my phone's camera isn't the best for demonastrating what colours were used, but I decided to highly any sunken areas of the face with brown facepaint and black eyeshadow.  Everything was framed (Note the patchiness near the forehead).  The patchier it was, the better it came out.

This is the finished product (And actually resembles what I look like in the morning). Red lipstick was used around the eyes to make them look red, as well as add to the contoured areas. Fake blooded will be added to the actor's faces also at a later date.

Animatic

Recce Shots of Locations

THE STATION

Finding the Interior location for our radio host was simple. There is an English classroom in lower school which has a mini radio station.

 With the addition of props such as bean cans, posters, bits of wires and additional laptops, we have ourselves a radio station. The lighting will be low - the computer screens will be the main light source and aid in silhouetting or illumination our actor.

THE WOODS
There is a dog walking area being the kirkby train station. Bradley 'et al' went to investigate... 

Along the paths and sparse woodland area, there are a selection of hills and ditches, which would be perfect for setting up low/high angle shots. Also, it's the infect girl could crawl up the hill at the end of the opening and the viewers would never see her coming.

Here is a broken arch, created by trees. This would be good for a long shot with the actor emerging through the trees, as the framing is neat and almost symmetrical.

Due to there being spacey parts of the woodland area available, the lighting will be bright and the film opening will have a more desolate feel. All the colours are faded; it's reminiscent of the Walking Dead.

Here, we decided to think of places that a back pack could go during our filming and incorporate the rule of thirds and thing how the scenes were going to be set up.

To show how much space and freedom we'd have during filming, here's a picture of some of our explorers...exploring.

Rought Script

To make our ideas more original for the film opening we decided to individuall work on our own timelines and scripts before coming back to the group and pitching our ideas to another another, and add different elements from each of the scripts to come up with a final piece.

The Survivor is a survivor as a hardened veteran, unphased to the events unfolding around him in an abandoned world.

On the other hand, our Radio Host will be eccentric, brightly dressed and very reclusive. He hasn't talked to another soul in so long that hasn't wanted to kill him, and the cracks are just beginning to show in his psyche.

 



 

 

This is the rough draft we came up with. We all picked the same storyline due to the mood board we created - then all we had to do was mock up our impressions of the character and what they might say.

Eventually, Chris wrote up the rough draft of the script, and we were to add further speech during filming or if more inspiration comes to us.

There are no certainties as of yet.