'The House That John Built'

Here is the video for my FMP. You may notice that it is a trailer and not a full film. This will be explained in my evaluation

Building The Set

Here are photos that we took whilst building furniture for the place our main character will be living. This took 2 days and although it's not quite as glamourous as we had originally envisioned, it certainly looks like its been thrown together by one guy with items he has just found lying around.

This next photo shows a storage area we made, but didnt end up using in the film.

 

 

 

 The weather got pretty bad the day after we had made this, which put filming back by almost a week. When we visited this area again, the wind and rain had pretty much destroyed it, so we had to put it all back together again. Fortunately this wasn't that much of a task, and masking tape saved the day.

Filming Day 4

Today I managed to film some more scenes at The Kings Arms. There wasn’t that much to film, we just had to alter some scenes so that it the story would make sense. Also, I have had to step from behind the camera to act out the scenes for the character of ‘Frank’ which was meant to be played by someone else. I really don’t enjoy being in front of the camera and I can’t say I enjoyed acting all that much.

That being said, all the scenes I needed got done and I spent the afternoon just getting some cutaway shots that I realized I needed whilst editing the film.
Now I can begin the editing properly.

Intro Credits

Here are the intro credits for the film so far. I have decided on the name 'The House That John Built' as the title to film, a play on the popular British nursery rhyme 'The House That Jack Built'. The editing is still early on in the editing process so the audio of the dialogue isn't great. I hope to fix this with an audio recording software called Nuendo. I have used this before to alter audio in other work I have done and have managed to get good results.

Also the quality of the video in this footage will not reflect the quality of the finished product. I have been filming in 1080 HD with 60 frames per second and it looks really good, but for this I did a quick mixdown just to show the progress I am making so far.

Filming Day 3

Today I filmed the final scenes needed for the film at a friends house in Plymouth. After having to rewrite much of the film yesterday, I was a little bit unprepared. The scenes today involve the character ‘Sally’, played by Laura Murphy. Again, I had another issue with an actor not turning up and had to rewrite the script yet again. This meant that ‘Sally’s’ role was downsized greatly and now just involves her character speaking on the phone.

I will have to go back to The Kings Arms to reshoot some of the scenes we filmed yesterday in order to make the story work.

Filming Day 2

Today we filmed all the scenes in The Kings Arms. Two of the actors that were required in the film didn’t turn up, which meant we had to rewrite a lot of the scenes. This was obviously hassle I could have done without, but it actually worked out well as it forced to squeeze information that would come in later, perhaps unnessary scenes, into earlier scenes.

The script rewrite shouldn’t affect the scenes that we filmed yesterday but tonight I’m going to have to go over the script again for the scenes that we film tomorrow.

Filming Day 1

Today was the first day of filming. We have got a huge bulk of the film done and it went pretty smoothly. We started at 11am and were done by 5pm. The scenes we filmed today were the outdoors scenes when our main character ‘John’ decides to live in the wild. Even though these scenes come later on in the film we had to shoot them first because Ross Clarkson, the person playing John, needed to have a beard and messy hair. He will be shaving the beard off and trimming his hair for the rest of his scenes which we will film tomorrow at The Kings Arms.

We used the script that I wrote, although only loosely as I like to leave room for improvisation. Sometimes ideas will come to me when we are actually shooting that wont come to mind when I’m sat in a room writing. This obviously doesn’t always work when the film goes into editing but I’m confident that the improvised scenes will fit very nicely.

The scenes that were storyboarded came across well and although I haven’t always stuck to what I’ve drawn in the storyboards, it definitely came in handy when trying to direct my actors.

After watching the footage back, it has come out well, although the audio isn’t as perfect as I would like. Hopefully this won’t be too much of an issue when filming scenes over the next few days.

Storyboards

I have nearly completed the storyboards for the film. Here are some of the scans. Click to enlarge.

Scoring Session

Once I had decided on the final idea for my film, and i'd completed a rough first draft of the script, I began thinking about what kind of music I wanted for the soundtrack. I wanted the music to be very lighthearted and quirky so I started listening to certain film soundtracks to find the right sound, but I was struggling to find anything I really wanted in the film, but mainly grew more against the idea of using music from existing films.

The soundtrack to the 2008 film 'Step Brothers' was one that came very close to the style of music I was looking for, but a soundtrack album was never released for the film. The only piece of music from the film I could find was this youtube clip...



In the end I decided that I would write my own soundtrack for the film. However, the idea for the main theme didn't come out intentionally. It came from a random jam I had with my friend Anthony Clifford. It was a complete accident, but we played it for about a minute, I knew it was perfect. I recorded a rough version of it on my phone, and a few days later we recorded it in Anthony's kitchen.

This is a video of us recording the first take.



We did 3 takes of the track. We deemed take 3 to be good enough. The rest of the evening was spent recording a few more tracks that I had written before hand. They all have a similar vibe to this and I'm pretty happy with how the soundtrack has came out.