A busy few days, focused with determination on filming, this difficult task. At times I've despised every moment of this time consuming and frustrating form of art, but it is a new country to explore, and I'm starting to appreciate the challenges and creative opportunities of filmmaking. These music videos, especially with music without words, are like visual poems. There is an element of mood, the music really affects the mood of the scene, but there is a lot of freedom too. It's often difficult to impose drama in the film if there is none in the music. The emotions must follow the music.
For the Time, Falling video I had a key scene of the bear falling at the dramatic peak of the music, the rest merely building to it. This was quite simple, but this Fly in Amber video is more complex because the music is two, almost identical, repeating sections. Initially I had some toys and puppets filmed in darkness, a king and queen character, myself playing the piano in daylight, and some scenes with Deborah. It felt a bit like a mish-mash and over complicated so I simplified to dividing scenes into day and night, with the real characters mostly in the day, and the toys mostly at night, but there needed to be some sort of journey or aspects of memory which are difficult to convey in characters that can barely move.
The most affecting scenes were the ones with main characters, with my hand acting as sort of god, placing characters which might move a little. This worked well but the plot needed to be worked and reworked to fit these. I've filmed and refilmed everything at least four times, including playing the full piece at a keyboard, which didn't work well enough to use. The video still isn't finished but I can see an end in sight.
I am learning new technical aspects with each film. This time I've made an adapter to fit the spotlights on tripods, essential for lighting. I've also extended their power cord to 5M and added a power switch.
I've also learned a new fade up technique, fading to white by boosting exposure. This was directly inspired by a similar effect in Three Colours: Blue which I watched last night and had a similar fade. Most digital fades to white look weak and pasty, like a white fog gently appearing, rather than the flash of glory I wanted.
Two full days of filming. More to do today. I need to film some playing cards. This is my first film that uses some computer graphics, a falling playing card. This is the first CGI I've used in years. An easy job with a rotating, moving plane. I can't match the shadows of the environment very easily, so the results look a bit fake, but not so bad. Even Avengers: Infinity War, which I watched yesterday, looked very fake in almost every shot. It had the emotion of a digital animation, rather than a real film with real actors, and yet this was still perhaps the most emotional of all of these Marvel spectacles.
