Production: Location Filming

We filmed in two on location places, one was a back room of my grandparents house which looked sufficently old and creepy, the second was the woodlands not too far from my home. For the on location filming we had to film the intro, outro and the book opening and closing. We filmed in the forest (which was the outro) first. Me and Jess drove out into a deeper part of the woodland lugging the old table i had bought before along with the book outer bits… not sure if there is a word for it, the spine the cover and back but with no paper in it. We also brought a compliment of duct tape and wire for guerrilla filmmaking/animating.

We fashioned a wire duct tape combination to hold up the book ready for falling, and then built ourselves our own little rostrum out of my tripod. The lights didn’t quite conform to the measurements we took in the stop motion room unfortunately, due to a little bit of uneven ground and the fact that the sun was acting as our backup light. We at first tried filming the cover falling down by just dropping it down and making the camera continuously take pictures (as we were going to film in pixelation) but the book fell far too fast to be captured correctly. We then fashioned another wire contraption (the savvy Macgyuvers that we are) which Jess could use to slowly lower the book cover while i made sure the spine moved correctly with my finger and held down the picture button on the camera. All the wires and fingers and such I would edit out in Photoshop. Finally we did the outro, which was the camera moving up and away to reveal the book and table where now in the reversion world aka a woodlandy area. We achieved this with me lifting the tripod and camera and walking backwards with it, Jess held down the picture button making it continuously take photos and also in the ending bit did focus pulling.

The second location was a different kettle of fish however, the sun while it was our backup light it was a backup light filtered through this.

So a little less helpful to the cause. And the room we used was… well it wasn’t the biggest room ever.

So we had to move around some stray boxed full of random things my grandparents had stowed there such as big boxes of roof tiles. After we cleared the space a little there was just enough room for us to squeeze in with the table and two lights. So full steam ahead, tally ho and all that right? wrong, unfortunately. Well not wrong per say, the lowering down the back of the book onto the table was similar to the lowering of the cover in the first location (apart from having a big block of paper balanced on end in the spine of the book). Wire book lowerer, wire and duct tape holding up maggufin, all that jazz.

But then came the intro. As you know, if you read the beginning of this post, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t have considering your here… unless you skipped to this point of course, which if you did welcome i suppose. As i was saying, as you read earlier (or haven’t as the case may be) we achieved the outro by lifting off the tripod rostrum and walking backwards with it taking pictures as we went with the auto take many pictures function (wow don’t i just sound like a technical wizz). The problem we now had is that the intro is meant to walk up to the table and settle down which is a bit difficult when your camera is kind of in a specific location position wise. We ended up achieving this look by doing the walk back again and simply reversing the video in post, but that was not the troublesome part.

The real problem was keeping the book complete with large stack of paper standing directly upright as we filmed the intro. This may not sound incredibly hard but I actually had to make that book myself out of greyboard faux leather and PVA glue… so it wasn’t what you would call expertly crafted. The sides of the book where a tiny bit bowed and there was no way they would just stay directly upwards and shut in the best of times, let alone with a big wad of paper weighing them down. The answer was obvious as soon as the problem revealed itself though, we had to build something to hold it up simple… but the kicker was, it had to be as invisible as possible. We couldn’t have it on the side facing the camera or else it would be visible for the whole walk up the stairs, and we didn’t want it splaying out across the table either. So using wire (that wasn’t really that rigid) and tape, we had to make a construction that was only on the back part of the spine but would effectively hold two A4 bits of greyboard with faux leather wrapped around and at least over fifty pieces of paper directly upwards and together. Simple goal but not a simple task.

After what I would imagine was an hour or more (or maybe it only felt like that) we had something that worked. A large amount of wire had been shoved up between the pages and inside the book running up and down, but we had done it. We filmed our intro doing the walk back from the book tripod in hand and camera snapping, but it was too dark. We had to move the lights away obviously so they didn’t get in the walking away shot, but the sun just wasn’t shining and from inside that room with its single window it was just pitch black.

We panicked a bit, but then thought hay we could just do the walk back again couldn’t we. I mean it wouldn’t be in the exact same place on the starting book point which is why we walked backward in the first place, but better to have it look good and a little off than literally un-seeable but perfectly in line. So we did another two takes to try and get a good one and then our construct, our mona lisa of all wire maguffins failed us, the book toppled and so did our chances of getting another run at the intro. So we packed everything up and left, a days work done. Also we ended up using the second take, had the best lighting.