Professional Practice - Directorial Showreel & General Case Study Update

So today I finished my Directors Showreel, as part of my case study for my Professional Practice unit.

What I neglected to mention, is my project with The Nameless Foundation fell through at the last minute, so I have had to resort to doing the Case Study. For my case study, I am looking into the Director/Writer/Producer that is Tim Burton, and writing about his career, how he got to where he is, how the usual person would get to his level, and how I would apply it to myself.

I have found this relatively difficult, but have some interesting books that have helped. I have also found good quotes from websites such as the BBC Writers Forum, skillset and general interviews with Tim Burtons about each of his pictures. What has been more difficult however is writing about how to apply it to myself. Naturally I can say that I would take the same route as Burton if I can, but elaborating in more detail is proving difficult.

On top of that, a Directors CV and Showreel must be made.

I finished the showreel today, and am pleased with the result. To create this, I had to gather together all of the best of my past projects, and even some of the footage of my upcoming projects I have directed. I picked and chose clips from each of them, which I felt best showcased my talents, whilst putting fitting music over the top of them.
The music I chose is Gary Jules - Mad World for The Raven
Extreme Ways - Moby for Gullible
Superman theme for Behind the Cape
and
Guitar Flute & String - Moby for The Tale of Graham Beadle

I felt these fit correctly. It was difficult to choose the clips, and upon looking at other show reels, I felt I shouldn't include much speech. I was directed (ironically :P ) in the other way with this, and lowered some of the sound levels so it wasn't just clips of people with their mouths moving.

Anyway, here is the finished product. I hope you like it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohJ-N3BTTrI&feature=c4-overview&list=UU01lt6FJ5Lg9X4z-8BFFWeQ

2nd Year Major Production - Behind the Cape filming

From Saturday - Monday I did the filming of my Major Production, my mockumentary "Behind the Cape"
It kicked off quite well. After having spent £75 on costume the night before, I created the costumes from scratch, with the help of my housemate who is on the Creative Arts of Theatre and Film course at UCA Rochester. We created the Captain Justice costume. To do this, I got a green morph suit, printed off the Captain Justice logo, and stuck it on. We then fashioned a cape out of blue material, put blue boxers over the top of the morph suit, and used blue gloves. I was very proud with the finished product and my actor, Jamie Drabble, looked fantastic.

The costume was good and rather fitting. I also had to dye the lab coat over night for Doctor Z, the villain. Sadly, the coat was meant to be black, and the dye we got turned the coat a bluey/grey. It would seem the reason for this would be that the coat was made out of polyester, and it should have been cotton to dye correctly and turn into the Black colour I wanted. As much as I would have liked he coat to be black, it did work well having it grey. The red Z came out really nice on the back of the coat, and it didn't make the costume so monotonous, as if it was all black it could have looked quite bland.

On the Saturday, we filmed all of the Captain Justice scenes, his talking heads, and all of the bits of just him. We could not do the outside bits as it was raining. We brought a rain cover with us, but did not use it as it was too heavy. Checking the forecast, we waited for the next day, as it was meant to be clear skies.

Coming to the next day, Joz Norris, who played Doctor Z, arrived early in the morning and the weather was kind to us, and we were able to film the outside park scene, featuring the first confrontation of Justice and Z. We also did all the parts we missed the day before that should have been outside with Captain Justice.

The shoot went really well. We did run across a few problems however. The main issue, was casting.
I had enough actors lined up, mainly to play all of the villains come the Doom Troop meeting in Doctor Z's house. One of my actors, Dalton Mundell, had to drop out at the last minute. He was playing one of the Doctor's henchmen. As the henchmen was a necessary part, I recast the person playing the villain 'Jeff' and cast him as Fidel instead. Jeff was wiped from the script entirely, however, I liked his lines so much, I decided to keep them, and give them to the non-speaking role of The Terrorist. The other issue I suffered from, was my actor for the character of 'The Fiddler' - a gypsy pickpocket, had to pull out last minute as they couldn't do the Sunday when we were filming. They offered for the Monday, but all the other villains, I only had for the Sunday. This was quite upsetting as I could find no replacements and the character had to be cut, despite his talking head being one of my favourites. It was okay to cut him however as the part wasn't entirely necessary, it would just have been nice to have.

Every thing else in the shoot went well. In retrospect, I next time would sort my casting out a bit earlier, and have dates ready and sorted knowing exactly when I will shoot, so I can make sure people will come exactly when I need them (although to be fair, they were sorted a while before, it was just last minute pull outs).
Maybe I should get back ups just incase.

Here are some of the costumes from the day.

2nd Year Major Production - Character Inspiration 2

Next up I will post some of my inspiration from another couple of characters. The first being the main villain of Dr Z.

Whilst I have built Dr Z up on my own, I suppose a good representation of him would be Dr Evil from Austin Powers, only again, not as eccentric or over the top. Just in the sense that he is a comedy Super Villain. I will post a video of him regardless, so you can understand a small bit of a villain that inspired me.

This is an introduction for Doctor Evil, doesn't give you a huge character reference, but it shows who he is.

The second is for Dr Z's two henchmen. First you should know, they are named Fidel and Benito, both of which are named after dictators, Fidel Castro and Benito Mussolini. This is just a fun reference. They are in fact just two bumbling idiots, that are completely useless at anything. Fidel is the smarter of the two however, while Benito just doesn't really know what is going on most of the time.
Benito himself does have some inspiration drawn from the character of Kevin Malone, from the US version of The Office. I shall show him here:

Kevin doesn't have much common sense, which I have amplified slightly with the character of Benito, despite him just being a bit part, though he is one of the more Major Supporting Characters.

The rest of the characters I have created haven't really got an inspiration as such, I didn't loosely base them off of anyone, but these were just a few examples of characters I have based and got inspiration from other shows off.

2nd Year Major Production - Character inspiration

When I came  up with the characters for Behind the Cape, I had a few inspirations for some of my characters. I took my influences from certain characters from television and film, and have very loosely based some of my characters on them.

The first is Captain Justice. He took inspiration from 2 of my favourite cartoon characters. Captain Hero (from Drawn Together) and Sterling Archer (from Archer). I have toned him down a lot though as the characters of Captain Hero and Archer are quite extreme. I shall post videos to give a better idea of who they are and what I mean. Captain Justice has taken some of the arrogant personality traits of Archer, with him believing he is amazing and the best at what he does, whilst taken the 'really awful Super Hero' idea behind Captain Hero. Personality-wise, Justice isn't much like Captain Hero, who is a disgusting individual, I just liked the idea of a really poor Super Hero.

This is some best bits of Captain Hero

And some of the best quotes and moments from Sterling Archer.

If you tone these characters down a bit, you get Captain Justice, only he does have his own personality traits, and he is individual in his own rights. This is just where I drew inspiration from.

2nd Year - Major Production - Casting

So I began the other week, looking for someone to play the main role of Captain Justice. I posted an ad on casting call pro, and wrote an audition script which I sent out to a few of the people who applied. So far I have only had one video audition response, which quite frankly, was nothing like I had hoped or I had imagined, so the actor who sent me that will not be getting the part. I am now hoping and waiting on the other actors to get back to me.
The role of the villain, Doctor Z has also been cast as Josiah Norris, who is a comedian and writer, and who also hosted my Studio Production project 'Punchlines'. I feel he will bring a good amount of comedy, warmth and depth to the character of the villain, and help portray him in the way that I imagine him to be, which is why I cast him.
I just now need Captain Justice to be cast. A few extras have already been cast, I just need to find a few more, but that should not be too difficult. I shall bring updates as and when I receive more audition pieces for Captain Justice, and eventually post who I have cast as the role.

2nd Year - After Effects Workshop

On Wednesday, we went to Rochester campus to have an After Effects Workshop with Simon Holland. This was the first of a 5 week tutorial to help us understand how to animate certain things to help us with graphics and possibly some basic special effects we may wish to use within our pieces. We learnt how to impose images into other images, and give them certain effects like glowing, make it seem like it was raining and other such things. We then were given a logo for a fake company, and asked to animate a couple of things within it, such as gears which were shown in it, and we made them rotate.
All in all it was a good morning, that helped as previously I would never have known where to begin with After Effects. We also learnt how to render the files. The things I made are on the computers back at the campus so I shall upload them when we are next in.

Professional Practice - Dissertation Proposal Presentations

Dissertation Proposal Presentation from wilderb33st