Production Report

Our idea for the workshop group project was something that Louis largely came up with. Inspired by ‘The Mirror’ [1] and also in part ‘Eraserhead’ [2] due to the brief that specified that we should work to give our piece an ‘uncanny’ feel, we decided to incorporate various aspects of the set design that those two films had included in their own sets.

Our base idea was that of two parents and a child. We wanted the child to be something horrific- this is where we drew the inspiration from Eraserhead. As there is no sound in our film, we decided to hopefully incorporate the visual effect of lights dimming as one of the parents gets closer to the child. This would set the tone to the piece, also incorporating in the uncanny. I did a lot of research into painting and designing the set more like those two films as a main inspiration, finding out alternate ways to painting that would also help achieve the effect that we were after.

For me, one of my inspirations for our piece came from the words of Mashiro Mori, a roboticist that tried to explain where our feeling of uncanny when faced with almost human like objects or things. He forwarded the 'Uncanny Valley' hypothesis, in which that being 'almost' like a human being causes feelings of repulsion [3], which is something that we wanted to create in our film. Of course, all of these findings of the uncanny had been built upon from when Sigmund Freud published 'Das Unheimlich' where he speaks of the reanimation of people or characters and the animation of characters or people that it should never be possible to be animated at all. When put into a mundane setting, outside of fairytales, the uncanny becomes a betrayal to the watcher- "he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all overstepping it" [4]

['Das Unheimliche' by Knut Larsson]

Louis and I had previously cut out a window in one of our flats, which then Bronte and I affixed. This window was created for green screen purposes, as what we planned to do was to put streetlights outside the window to create the idea of a bigger world- and to have the lights turn off with every step of the male actor towards the ‘baby’ to further the sense of uncanny and also to give us the experience with the VFX.

For our set, we wallpapered our four flats, to give them a textured appearance once we painted them a brown colour. We then stippled brown and red over the brown paint, and once dried it gave a grimy appearance. Once everything was dried, we then went over with a different, textured and patterned wallpaper in white. I then went over the wallpaper with a tea solution and a stippled brush, to give it a more dated feel- and as that was drying I started to peel the wallpaper back so that it dried and gave a crisp old feel on the parts that were exposed of the brown underneath. This was to give an appearance of the set like the bedroom in ‘The Mirror’ which is what we were basing our wall décor of, even though the colour scheme of ours was slightly different as we did not use light colours to increase the appearance of the ‘Uncanny’. Browns and other dark colours formed the basis of our set, to give it a feel of being abandoned and something to beware of.

I wasn’t sure during the set building process whether the end product would be what had been envisioned, but as we started to get towards the end of building and wallpapering the set I saw that it was beginning to come together better than I had imagined. I feel like just the set itself helped to create a sense of the uncanny. Freud had said that the uncanny was a ‘feeling or sensation’ [4] above anything else and I agree, and I think that looking at the set it gives off the sensation of strangeness and a general oddness that I think embodies uncanny.

It could possibly be improved further (and with more time) by the use of different flooring. We had planned to use a full linoleum tiled floor that Jessica had set aside for us, but the means of transportation just weren’t possible and therefore we weren’t able to get it to Sheffield in time for filming. Also, I would have painted the flats rather than have wallpapered them before painting them, as this wasted some time and I don’t think the results warranted the use of the wallpaper which was a costly expense and also seemed like a bit of a waste of time we could have been working on other things such as making our window more realistic, and less like a hole in the wooden flat.

Working in the group I feel like I did my fair share of work, both during pre and post production. I had a major hand in set building and gathering methods that we could use in the process. Both Louis and I came in on various days to put up the set and I also went to buy various supplies and give input in these decisions. Unfortunately I wasn’t there for the filming, but I supplied Louis with a potential shot list and I had storyboarded a potential scene that could have been filmed so that I did not have zero contribution to filming. In post-production, as I have my own copy of Final Cut Pro I was able to have quite a large input into the finished scene. For green screen however, we had to all be present for workshops that were amazingly informative and it wasn't too hard to learn how to layer the green screen so that you could put a video in the background of the film. 

We didn't use much green screen in our scene as we had a short video to put into the backdrop, rather than the complicated green screen that other groups had. Louis provided the CGI that we then put onto our footage in After Effects, which worked better than I had thought but not to the realism we had hoped. We also experimented with other people’s footage to gain the skills of motion tracking that we couldn’t really achieve with our own footage, as it was not needed. We used Tyler's group’s footage for this, as they had a woman that could be motion tracked across the screen and this practise then helped us with the motion tracking in our own. The raining blood Visual Effect that we wanted to use was unrealistic but we had no other options available to us in After Effects- and we simply assembled in Final Cut Pro rather than edited so we were unable to use those effects as Final Cut Pro had been deleted off the university iMacs.

All in all I think that we worked together to make a piece well, although we had some setbacks such as other peoples sets being viewable in our footage. However I personally feel like I learnt a lot, from making the effects myself straight onto the set to using green screen and re-learning how to do motion tracking on After Effects. There's now a lot more things that I can do after this module than before, and it's sparked a further interest into visual effects and SFX. I think more workshops would have been beneficial in the long run, but the ones that we did get were good in quality and helped with the specific effects that we were looking for.

I think our weaknesses are definitely the footage itself which we shot, which is a shame as the angle of the cameras were obviously not checked on the day but something that we had to move forward and work with regardless. The set itself was a success in terms of how we wanted to achieve it, and using tools and joinery to achieve it was a skill I did not know prior to the module, which I consider a success. However, I would have positioned our set differently, as we did not realise that other sets would be in the background of our shots at a certain angle until it was too late to rectify this. I also like our effects on our final piece, which although may seem a little unrealistic, do give a sense of uncanny and we did do our best with the resources and knowledge that we had. However, it does give it an otherworldly feel which in itself is a sense of uncanny, as the lack of realism makes you wonder whether you are looking at a film shot in this world, or not. With as the window being a 'hole to another dimension' and the blood rain, it makes the audience question whether they are looking at a true film or not.

Word Count: 1505

References.

1.    The Mirror, 1975. Film. Dir. Andrei Tarskovsky. Mosfilm, Soviet Union.

2.    Eraserhead, 1977. Film. Dir. David Lynch. American Film Institute, USA.

3.    Kawaguchi, J (10 March 2011). "Robocon founder Dr. Masahiro Mori". Words To Live By. Japan Times. p. 11. Archived from the original on 13/03/2013. Retrieved 02/12/2014.

4.     Frued, S (1919). 'Das "Unheimlich" [online].  http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html Retrieved 04/12/2014