Elysian Productions - Eoin

Above is the poster for Rain Man, a poster that heavily inspired us for the River poster. This poster is really simplistic in design; it's not packed to the brim with quotes from the film or from reviews. It simply has the two main characters walking down the street, with their names and the title of the film.  It makes use of the Z rule. You can see the actors names along the top, the title and the two characters in the middle and the award that it won in 1988 for Best Picture. The two characters are the focus of the poster, however. You can see them walking side by side down a road towards the camera. This obviously sets these two characters as the focus of the film. The main theme of the film is companionship and I think that this poster reflects that well. The two characters are walking beside each other, indicating that they're getting closer to each other, however Tom Cruise's character walks with his right and in his pocket; perhaps indicating a slight reluctance...

The music creation process was one that, again, I thoroughly enjoyed. Music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and being able to impart that into our project was a joy.  For the main theme, I made a simple recording of my bass guitar, which was plugged directly into Audacity with no effects or filters, apart from a noise reduction filter applied after recording. This was based of the Dies Irae chant, except changed into a major key to make it a less sombre and menacing. This was relatively quick to record and was done within a few minutes. What wasn't done in a few minutes was the cover that I performed of Helplessly Hoping by Crosby, Stills and Nash. I first discovered this song while watching Annihilation, and when thinking of music for the Amy's House scene, this popped into my head and I immediately consulted our group and asked their opinion on it. They all agreed that it was a good idea, so I went ahead and recorded it. For recording, I used a...

Overall, I had a great time filming. During last year's project, I was in front of the camera as well as behind, and as well as this I had to do the editing. This meant that I didn't get the time to put a lot of thought into the camerawork. This year, my focus was entirely on the cinematography and the music. In this regard, it meant that I had more time to spend thinking about how I was going to do a shot and what would make it best. It also meant that I could take time and research certain cinematography styles, like Edgar Wright's and Hideo Kojima's.  I enjoyed having the creative liberty to consult with the director and decide how a shot should be played out, as well as taking it upon myself to film things the way that I think would look best. It was also great to get the feedback from everyone after a shot was taken and people could suggest ways to do a shot better. We were fairly efficient with our filming, despite the fact that it took a fair few days to get ...

This process was a little more complicated than the poster was. It applied the same gradient and brightness filters, however on the title text and the border I was asked to invert the colours. To achieve this, I created a clipping mask of both the border and the title text, then overlaid the same background image, but without the gradient and brightness filters and with the colours inverted. This then achieved the desired effect, with the colours changing but the actual image itself is not interrupted. I then had to make it look like an actual magazine review, so I decided to use Empire as the magazine it was going into, then added in the review text. I also added in a large quote above the title text and a brief verdict and star rating at the end of the review, as is the style of Empire reviews. I added the page numbers and issue date to the bottom left and right hand corners of the page and considered it done.

The poster was created by me using Photoshop. It was a fairly quick process and didn't take long to do. There were only a few minor basic adjustments that were made to the image and then the title text, the main actors' names, the billing block and a few awards were added to the image. 

This was the final filming session that we had to do. This was only a few shots, but we had a problem; our actor for Kevin wasn't able to attend. We worked around this by getting the same hoodie off him, then Aaron acted in his place but was careful not to show his face to the camera. It worked well and it wasn't even noticeable in the final product.

In our forth filming session, we had to record a couple of shots that we left out from the previous session. These were a shot of Kevin and Ron stopping, and a shot of them as they meet the limbo. It was a bit jarring having Kevin and Ron randomly stopping mid-walk, and we feel that the characters needed to acknowledge the thing that they were seeing in front of them. Apart from this, we also filmed a short bit of nature footage to use as something to play in the background while the credits are playing. We also filmed Kevin stumbling about in a drunken state the night before he wakes up to play at the start of the film. This was a relatively short filming session, however it was just to fill in the blanks we had missed. 

In this session, we got a lot done. It was a much nicer day out that the previous two sessions, so we felt more motivated to get stuff done as we didn't have to go inside from being too cold. We finished getting a few of the Limbo shots that we left out or needed to be re-recorded. We also filmed the scene of Kevin getting the message from his friend. This was fun to film, and it really let the actors express themselves and in the end really showed their acting skills off. We also got a few nice shots of nature to put in as filler shots. As well as this, we also got some shots for the final scene. However, we couldn't do the last one as we needed a tripod and we forgot to bring it with us that day. We did attempt this but it didn't work. We also got the shot that we would use for the magazine review.

During this filming session, we got a lot more done than in the first outdoor filming session. It was still fairly cold out, and it began raining half-way through filming. We decided to keep filming and just leave it. However, you can see the rain on the lens in some of the shots. Despite this, I think we're just going to leave it in, as it does create a quite nice aesthetic on the shots. In this session, we got most of the shots of Ron explaining the world around them and what's going on. We also did the filming for the Limbo scene, where Aaron played the Limbo. This was a fun scene to do, and Aaron really got into character for these shots. We also took the photo that we are going to use for the poster.

This scene was fun to film. In this scene, we used the ellipsis technique to speed up Ron getting ready to go out. We also filmed him suddenly waking up after falling asleep at his table. He is going to be woken up by the sound of the printer, which is printing off his "job sheet" for the day; essentially a list of people he needs to pick up. The shot of him waking up has a subtle bloom effect as the camera adjusts to the light; this was completely accidental, but we thought it looked nice, so we are keeping it in. You can also notice that his laptop is opened on his LinkedIn page. We made one especially for Ron, as a subtle hint to more eagle-eyed viewers that this is indeed his job. 

For the shots of Ron getting ready after waking up, we wanted to have an ellipsis of him getting ready. It would obviously be too long to film his entire morning routine, so we had to shorten it down while keeping it visually pleasing.  Our main inspiration for this came from Edgar Wright. He is a fan of these quick-cut ellipsis shots, and makes them look very good and can be used for a bit of visual comedy, as well as making mundane things more interesting and exciting. If you break down the shots into their simple shot types, it is easy to recreate. In the example above, there are a series of close-up shots that then zoom into an extreme close-up almost instantly. These are then cut together in quick succession one after another to create a fast-paced feel. We want to incorporate the same thing into our film, to make Ron getting ready less mundane and boring. Now we know the formula, we can apply it to our film. The one thing is, it is hard to zoom quickly on a phone came...

In this filming session, we got the first few outdoor shots done. This was a hard filming session. Although the sun was out in a few shots, it was bitterly cold outside and it was hard to get much done. It was also quite windy, which hindered the audibility of the audio. We tried our best to mitigate this. We used a small microfiber bag and wrapped it around the end of the microphone, but there was only so much we could do. The audio turned out to be pretty unusable, so we will have to dub that later. Despite our issues, we managed to get a few shots done that we can use. We got the whole scene of Kevin waking up and talking to Ron. These shots worked well, overall I am happy with how this scene went. Ideally, we would have gotten more done, but there is still plenty of time to go out and film the rest of this scene.