What I Do at University: Film Production

Alright guys, it’s time for part 2 of my ‘What I Do at University’ blog posts. Now I’m gonna tell you a little bit about what I’ve spent this year so far doing for my film production (single cam) course.

For this year we produce four films. A short documentary, a long documentary, a fiction piece and an experimental piece. Because I don’t like working in big groups I’m just sticking with Emma and Richard to do all of the projects. Emma is on producing/camera, phoning people and shouting at everyone and Richard is on editing/microphone, breaking computers and being shouted at. We just finished off the long documentary and now we’re moving onto the fiction piece which I’m hoping to base on a school shooting (fun stuff). But lets not get ahead of ourselves here.

For the short doc, we had to create a 3 minute piece about someone with an interesting life, personality or story to tell. Naturally, we chose to interview Peter ‘Pedro’ Brown, a 64 year old clown/journalist whose wife breathes fire. He was pretty awesome and after the interview juggled fire. For reasons no one cares about I can’t put the finished piece online but suffice to say it was fun experience.

For our larger doc, we needed to produce a 10 minute piece on one of a few subjects. So, being us, we agreed it would be perfectly logical to film it on airsoft weaponry (bb guns) and the crimes surrounding it. This took us on a pretty incredible journey (a pretty incredibly expensive journey that is). We met the Armed Response Unit of Lincolnshire (who were kind enough to fire live ammunition for us (MP5 and a Glock 17), Fire Support who deal airsoft weapons and run UKARA and Andy’s Airsoft who let us film an entire game (when it was pouring it down with rain).

Airsoft (opening sequence)

The best part was definitely the filming at Andy’s Airsoft. I rigged up one of my Sony HDV’s to a mask/helmet/thing with mad duct tape skills. It allowed us to film first person footage just like a real video game (wooow).

super hat-cam that totally wasn’t painful to wear or anything

I also managed to stab my thumb when trying to remove the camera in the middle of a firefight. I then proceeded to bleed all over Richard’s guns. THANKS RICHARD ;D

Next up was the fiction piece. I had big plans for this one. Big, awesome, bloody, plans. I wanted to film a 10 minute one-shot (no cuts) film that would follow a student trying to escape a school shooting. Lots of intense moments, dead bodies and impressive cinematography. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the location so we had to give up on that idea.. THEN me and the group had ideas about a series of skits or a sketch about war. We planned that for a whi-yeah we couldn’t get the location for that one either. Then I got bitter. Bitter about the industry, bitter about classmates, bitter about the standard of work my coursemates were producing and how we were only expected to meet those low, low standards. So I wrote a parody.

A Student Film

Believe me, there’s a lot more disdain behind this piece that you’d think. It’s aimed mostly at the people who see more student films than anyone else, teachers. I hope they like it. Hitting Bing with a car was the best part of making the film. It was also the most expensive. A majority of the cost of the shot went into buying clothes/mask for the stunt dummy filling in for Bing and the bribery of the car owner to let us roll a faux corpse of his bonnet. I most certainly lol’d. Outtakes coming soon.

The final project is an experimental film that’s due in May 14th. It’ll be up on YouTube shortly after then so keep an eye out. I can guarantee it’ll give you seizures.

- TomSka out

What I Do at University: TV Production

Hey guys, I realised that I never really tell you what goes down in my university life so I thought I’d do a post to tell you what I spent the last semester (September – January) doing.

I study Media Production at the University of Lincoln. I’m currently in my second year and I’m studying two courses: TV production (multi cam) and Film production (single cam). Lemme tell you about them.

This is the class where we learn to make TV programs basically, anything that happens on a studio floor. Game shows, quiz shows, music shows, sitcoms, etc. We work in groups of roughly 15 and together we produce complete TV broadcasts. A project will start with everyone deciding on an idea and will end with the final live broadcast of it. We make the script, the set, hire the cast, operate the cameras, make the graphics and.. Well we do everything. The uni just provides the tools and grades us our performance.

For the first half of the semester we did a lot of warm up exercises. One of them was a simple music program that was had to set up. Nothing to crazy, just pick a song and get a band to play along to it and throw in an interview too. I took on the role of director for this mini-project because I knew I’d be too busy with other stuff to direct the bigger piece. So naturally, being the ass that I am, I decided to bet he first person ever to write/record a completely new track to be performed. So I did. This is how the project came out (i skipped the interview because it was boring and the sound quality was terrible):

After that, we started work on our 15 minute long ‘consumer affairs’ program. Basically we had to make one of those generic ‘exposing faulty/poor quality products’ shows but with a weird genre mixed in. The group chose horror. Our show was to be about a house of horrors where it’s inhabitants would come alive at night to assess poor quality products. Look, I didn’t write the script, okay?

For this project I was the ‘VT’ (video tape) director, meaning I was responsible for all the pre-recorded stuff that happened outside of the studio. It basically meant that all of my work actually happened before the live show. On the actual day that the show went live, I was just responsible for swapping out DVDs and pressing play. That would of course be a fairly simple process if the DVD player didn’t look like this:

Here’s one of the video inserts I produced for the project. It’s not the most interesting thing to watch ever but hey, that’s (british) showbiz.

The best part of the project was when Tim ‘Super Pervert‘ Nichols and one of our cameramen accidentally knocked over one of the cameras during a rehearsal, smashing a £2500 lens. What was funny about this was that the university was very forgiving over the camera smashing thing, what they flipped their lids over was the disrespectful and sarcastic nature of one of the students immediately after the camera had fallen over. The student? Me. The sarcasm? My misconstrued genuine apology on behalf the class. The penalty? One of the worst marks in the class. Awesome!

All in all, the project went well. It ran 2 minutes over schedule and we could’ve probably done with an extra rehearsal but everyone was happy with it and we got the highest mark out of all the groups. Even my ’second worst’ mark was still a 2-1 (kind of like a B+). This semester we have to put out a 30 minute program which the group has agreed will be a sitcom that I’ll be writing. Oh boy.

- TomSka out

asdfmovie2

Hello everyone! Sorry about the inactivity on this blog. I’ve been busy overeating and avoiding uni work. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now. Anyway, lets get on with the procrastination post.

With the new decade comes a new asdfmovie. I’ve been promising to make this ever since the first and, 15 months later, here it finally is.

This time I worked with Edd (eddsworld) instead of James (pivotrj) to animate the short. This was mainly because me and Edd are closer as friends/workmates and I trusted him more as an animator to recreate the original aesthetic of the asdfcomics that inspired the films without any real reference material. All Edd got from me was the audio and an animatic (see below) accompanying it. Once he’d animated the skit he’d send over the Flash file and I’d touch up anything that looked a bit messy (i.e. mouths and consistency of line thicknesses).

The hardest part about making the film was definitely writing the skits. It sounds ridiculous but it could actually take up to an hour of deep concentration to think up a skit. Trying to be ‘random’ and original at the same time is a lot harder than you might think. Honestly, try thinking up something random without intentionally ripping anyone off, using pop-culture references or swearing and still be funny too. It takes both time and heavy amounts of real world inspiration. I asked for help from a lot of people including Thomas Costello and Casey Margolis. Of course, being a picky kind of guy I ended up only using my own ideas. Sorry, fellas.

One of Casey’s skits (fax machine) almost made it in but got cut when I was compiling the final version of the movie. The original length of the film was about 2:30 but after some consultation with the test-watchers quite a few got cut out. You can see them here in the deleted scenes:

But enough about making the film. Lets skip to the release.

I woke up at 7:50am on new years day with a nasty headache from a night of drinking that never happened so that I could submit asdfmovie2 just as YouTube ticked over to 2010. In case this doesn’t make sense to you, YouTube runs on Pacific Standard Time so midnight there on America’s west coast is 8am here in the UK. Suffice to say, the film went up exactly one minute into the new decade.. which was nice.

For a couple days everything was normal in the world of YouTube. The movie was getting views and all was well. Until suddenly:

Ashton Kutcher, creator of Punk’d and star of The Butterfly Effect and Dude, Where’s My Car? decided to recommend me to his four million Twitter followers. In short, I was a happy man.

So far that’s about all I can tell you about asdfmovie2. In the upcoming months you can look forward to the release of an animated music video for the song “Totally Gay”, a remix of the “raaaaainbows” skit produced by Stephen ‘sherbethead‘ Grant, by our friend Diwi.

Also I’m working on a poster for asdf2 that I might try and sell in the near future along with the poster I created for asdf1. Any takers?

Well I hope you all enjoyed asdfmovie2 and I look forward to making another one next year possibly maybe who knows. Thanks for the platinum opening week, everyone!

- TomSka out