Video: Persuasion

With a limited time for shooting, we started early in the morning. It was a sunny day which was good for the equipment and actors but slightly annoying for the lighting. We hope we can fix this in post so it isn't too bright and shadowy. We had good luck with all the actors being available and managed to film the shots with no cars or other large background audio in it. On the main actor we used a lapel mic so that mainly his audio would be heard, and hopefully, clearly. We used a reflector to fix shadows outside and LED (China) lights to aid the shadows inside. After briefing the actor on the tone we were trying to achieve for the video, and being a professional actor he did a lot of visual and some audio ad-libbing to which we will put most of it in our final video because it just fit the humour of the script so well. Our biggest issue while filming was laughter... With all the shots filmed more than once, we'll begin choosing the ones we believe are the best and star...

So today we were testing out our gear (particularly sound) and getting a rough idea of how our shots are actually gonna form around our set. Clips below are a random assortment of us briefly going through our storyboard shot list as well as discussing changes we're going to make to the shots we'd planned. Sorry for the shitty quality of these mashups, Blogger limits the file size to shit all so any longer vids are gonna look like crap- but you can see the general idea of where our shots are heading compositionally.  This is a lil rough compilation of our storyboard plan stuck together (but not properly edited) This is us working out that a lapel mic combined with (white) reflectors will be the best lighting/sound combo for when we're shooting outside. We're gonna have to be aware of timing between our shots due to the sporadic traffic that passes the road behind where we're shooting. This evening we'll continue prepping our sets for tomo...

Storyboard with script: Animatic: Unfortunately we lost the original animatic video somewhere in the hollow abyss of Massey hard-drives... but we have a video of the video from messaging each other progress updates... Class notes on equipment ect...

Planning how we're going to organise ourselves over the next few weeks... In class we were shown all the different equipment we have access and can use, notes below are items we want to look into further for using in our shoots. Collaborating with Jess in class on our different storyboard ideas and where they're heading Map of where we plan to film outside...

In class today we learned how to use the basics of video cameras- specifically how to control lighting. We also had a good chat to Jason about our two ideas and in the end we concluded with the decision to actually try combine our ideas. This would follow the general idea that we'd start the video out by making it appear as another generic dating app commercial, but about mid way through when the product is usually named, we'd have a smart and funny tagline saying something like, "who needs friends when you can have ferns!" (we need to spend some more time coming up with better scripting.) And then the remainder of the video would consist of us briefly explaining the idea of saving native plants while showing the benefits of having a house plant. We plan of sprinkling humour throughout the entire video like our favourite research example video 'GiveUpAndSettle' . The next few days we'll begin hashing out some potential scene ideas and starting roughly ...

This week in our own time Jess and I began researching some examples and ideas of where we might like to head with our video. Ruth: TurboTax commercial.......... I loved the use of pace and tone in the TurboTax add to entice the viewer and using the 'fear' that some people have towards doing their taxes and turning this into a visual parody of relatable childhood fears. We took some notes of how we could apply this styling into our own videos in the screenshot below: (using the fern product idea.) This TurboTax add gave me the idea to perhaps try incorporate animation in our video? If we chose the fern idea then this could be a new avenue to explore in that we could create a 'cute' relatable fern character which we could use to win our audience over. (We love how in the 'cute' Lucas the spider video below, the characters voice is used in conjunction with visual animation style to completely change how the audience sees a normally unemotive or in this...