GRADED UNIT: Planning stage review.

With two and a half weeks to go until submission of the planning stage of my Graded Unit, things are busy, but going well. Following ongoing location reccies I have been in contact with various organisations, including Film Focus and Edinburgh Council, gaining permission to film at certain locations around the city. I hope to commence this is in April once my planning work has been approved by my course leaders. I have also been in touch with a representative of Stevenson.tv with a view to showing the final film on their website. 

On the technical front I have obtained an intervalometer to allow me take photographs at timed intervals and I’m beginning to practice with this and a D-SLR camera to find the best ways to use it. I have also been looking at how to maintain the utmost image quality from camera to final output and am investigating new ways to merge the images into a movie file. This involves the use of different software including Toon Boom & Adobe Premiere Pro. Here’s a short montage of my work so far:

GRADED UNIT: Proposal

Along with other course work and projects, I am currently working on my Graded Unit. We were initially introduced to this section of the course in January 2010 and were required to hand in Draft Proposals of ideas on the 16th of February 2010. I handed in three proposals. After discussing these with my tutors and colleagues a decision was made to go with the proposal of a short time lapse film called “Edinburgh”. 

I will research the techniques and methods of creating time lapse movies and then shoot, animate, edit and author the project to DVD. 

I hope to contact the relevant authorities and gather time lapse scenes from various locations around Edinburgh, both inside and outside the city. I hope that the end product will be 3 to 5 minutes in length and roughly follow a 24hr period of real time. I intend the music to be provided by moby gratis (link) or students from Stevenson’s Music Department. As well as being authored to DVD I hope that the final film will also be uploaded to the Stevenson TV website (link).

I have already begun experimenting with equipment and begun to gather test time lapse footage. I hope to upload an example of this soon.