Grandma Scene

For the third scene we planned, the story was that a Grandma with dementia finds her fish dead and so uses her 'Replay' product to find out why. In her flash back she sees she actually fed the fish her Alzheimer's medicine. She then buries her fish in the garden which we then see is next to a dozen more fish she has accidentally killed.

Unfortunately we couldn't find a grandma who would be willing/talented enough to play the part so we decided to use one of us and dress up as a Grandma. Since this video is meant to be for a crowdfunding page we decided it was okay if it looked homemade and like the grandma was fake.

We brought a wig and did some wrinkly skin make up...

The hurdle we had to cross was the fact that we need fish for this scene.

We debated actually buying real fish but decided we didn't actually want to keep the fish afterwards and couldn't find anyone else you would want some free fish...

Fortunately what we did have was an old fish tank.

We ended up buying fake toy fish and taping them the the side of the fish tank so that they looked like they were dead. 

For the flash back while the fish were supposed to be alive we just placed them in the water.

Product logo

We created a logo for the product that we have named "Replay".

We wanted it to look futuristic and professional and resemble a contact lense. We plan to animate this logo as well to use in the video.

We also printed out the logo and used it as packaging for our props in the video to reenforce that we are selling a product.

Here is our animation:

First person shooting

Because our product is a contact lens we needed to use first-person shooting to get a realistic effect that you are looking at a flash black through someones eye.

To achieve this look we used a regular digital camera and got behind the actor and held it in front of their face while they acted. Or we held the camera close to our face and walked around naturally with it. In some cases we had to get the actor to actually hold the camera and press record after we had set up the scene.

We also let the camera be as shaky as it naturally would be while holding it by hand to get the wobbly   first-person effect.

Colour Grading

We are using colour grading to help make the flash backs more obvious.

The colour grading for the present tense is bright and warm.

Whereas for the flashbacks (below) it is slight desaturated and has blue cold tones. We have also added a vignette to add the the effect that you are looking through someones eye. 

In the drinking scene (below) we have made it significantly darker and dramatically bluer to try and get the effect of nighttime and a dim bar. 

Video for Class Critique

Here is the rough edit we presented to class.

We received good feedback - mostly impressed that we could tell a story with no audio, simply through the visual storytelling.

We made the contrast between present and flash back obvious by using black and white just for the presentation because we were worried it could be confusing with no audio. Surprisingly it was noted that the black and white was working well. Unsure if we will keep the flash backs in black and white, we might just use obvious colour grading and vignette to achieve the same thing.

We still need to shoot the last scene. We are worried that our video will be too long with 3 scenes but we are willing to take the risk and film it just incase and if we have to make the call to take out a whole scene then we will.

Second Mirror Attempt

The second attempt looks much better. His positioning is better and the blinking animation we've added contrasts it from the normal (non first-person) footage which is different from these "flash backs". It also adds a cool effect which emphasises that we are looking through his eyes.

Mirror Shot Experimetning

We wanted to have a shot of the guy wearing the contact lens looking in the mirror. Since it's meant to be first-person shooting we needed to find a way to make sure the camera wouldn't be seen and make it look realistic.

Instead of editing out the camera afterwards we decided to try the technique where you film the subject straight-on looking into the lens and then film a shot of just the mirror. You then put them together in editing by using a mask.

Here are the two original footage before editing them together...

screen shot of us trying to work out how to use masks

This was our first attempt...

We are happy that you get the idea of what we want to achieve and its starting to look semi-realistic. But some issues are:

• the mirror is not a perfectly square in the image and so we need to edit our mask to perfectly fit it. 
• He is too zoomed in for it to look realistic, unfortunately we can't zoom out any further so we need to reshoot him.
• Also we need him to not be turning his head because then it wouldn't be realistic first-person shooting because the background would have to move as well. So in our next attempt we'll just have him looking straight on and maybe blinking a few times.