Thoughts on the final film

We have finished editing the sequence for the film - we still have to colour grade but due to technical problems we aren't able to do that just yet.
Colour grading aside, I am so proud of this film. It has come out exactly as I had envisioned it, thanks to our amazing crew.
From working with actors on scenes, to organising women to come in to set for us to interview, everything went smoothly and we got exactly what we needed on every shoot.
From promoting it on the Instagram and Facebook page, we have gathered followers who are very excited to see it, and our tutor Andy has prompted us to want to submit it to film festivals.


*UPDATE*
The film is now colour graded and being exported. We have still had problems with exporting but Andreas has kindly been helping us.
Upon watching the final export - there is definite problems with the sound, The  levels and the timing are slightly off which is incredibly annoying but we don't have time to fix it for the deadline - so we will try and fix it for the screening on Monday.

Because we were using 4 different types of camera, the colour grading was a bit of a challenge, and there is a definite change in quality between shots. We tried to mask this as best we could, but if we were to submit to festivals we may have to re-film certain parts to make it flow a little better.

I am still incredibly proud of the film - especially as it is the first film I have been able to direct within the Northern Film School. Ignoring the quality of some clips, the film itself turned out exactly as I had hoped.
The overal effect of the film is to make people feel uncomfortable, and to make them think about how they feel and view women in every day life. I chose not to discuss women's issues across the globe and to keep it more familiar. In the past few days, we have shown people small clips of the film, and they have given us the exact response we were searching for.

Other posters

I wanted to use the same font that we used within the film.

Problems with the post production

17:26pm
Our group has had problems with colour grading our film, as for some reason our project will not import into Resolve. Resolve has been 'loading' our files for nearly 2 hours now, but I am unsure if it will eventually load the files or will it just be frozen on the loading page for hours. (see below photo). Colour grading our film is really necessary as the clips in our film really vary in colour as we used 4 different cameras to film.

We uploaded a non colour graded version so we can meet the deadline and once Resolve ends up working we will upload a colour graded version between now and the screenings next week. Lewis told us to do this in order to meet our deadline, but hopefully we will be able to submit a colour graded version for the screening.

*UPDATE* 14:20pm
Andreas came in and was able to help us export the film, so we are now able to colour grade it. The export lost some of our editing - such as the titles, some crops and the NFS logos, so we will have to figure out how to fix that after colour grading.

Film Posters

I thought that it would be good to have a look into making film posters for our film. I chose the image for this one as I though it was powerful, as it is really central and shows a main subject of our film.

I made this one before we changed the breastfeeding scene so that we could make a more effective shot, but I still like the vibrant colours from it.

I created this one from a behind the scenes shot, this is also of a main topic of our film which I think represents our film well. I went with just having the bold title on it as it shows a statement about how woman should be more bold.

the soundtrack for our film

I would have liked to have the film composed to, but because of the tight timeframe I instead gathered some royalty-free creative commons music and mixed together a soundtrack.

Here is it with some marks to say what will happen when.

Things that didn't go as planned

As I booked out the kit for our second shoot, we found out that we weren't allowed to use our original camera that we had used in the previous shoot (Canon C300) as it wasn't on the "Experimental Film list". This meant that I had to amend the booking to have a different camera. At this point all the best cameras had been booked out so we had to use the Black Magic pocket camera. Which was disappointing. This now meant that we were going to have different quality footage in our film. I had also never used the Black Magic so I would have to learn how to use a new camera. We also were told that we weren't allowed to take the track and dolly outside to our location so this ruined the plans for our tracking time lapse shot that we had planned on doing for the breastfeeding scene. I then had to reconsider different shots that could be just as effective.

On the day of the shoot, we experimented with a few different ways of filming the breastfeeding scene. We just ran shot shot through as normal first to see if we could fast forward it in post- production to try and get the same effect as a time lapse. We then also tried out doing stop motion, where we moved the camera forward after every shot as a way of tracking in. Hopefully these techniques prove to be just as powerful so we can get the point of our film across.

We then had shoot days planned and then participants drop out on the day so we had to find new people to try and do our scenes which proved difficult to find people willing to do our edgy material. We then also experience software issues when it came to the edit for the film which made it hard to focus on the edit whereas, instead we had to sort out all the other issues.

All in all, I think we managed we and produced a film that we are proud of and had a lot of fun making it.

Shoot 2 -

This is some photos from the body hair scene. We wanted to do this to show that body hair is natural and not something to be ashamed of. We wanted to do it like an advert because the ones on TV show women shaving legs that don't have any hair on them. Which is not like in reality at all. We thought this would be a better way of showing that the razor worked on actual hair. I think it went well and loos how we wanted it to look, although it was really hard to get a good angle as we were in a tiny bathroom.





I think this scene also went well as we were able to get some good close ups of the grapefruit juice dripping onto the bedding. The down side to this scene will be the sound as our mixer wasn't working. So for the edit we'll just have to use sound effects.

We wanted to do this to show how some people over exaggerate about the amount of blood involved in someones period. We showed the actual amount which just a little drop falling down into the water. We then went onto Throwing a whole bucket in to show what people think it's like and make it extreme.

This is a photo from the breast feeding scene. We put tape on the floor to see where we needed to move the camera for the stop motion pictures that we were taking. The weather worked in our favour that day as there was lots of light to work with.

The original idea for the body hair scene was going to be of a woman getting ready to go out, and just happening to have hairy legs and armpits. I've been thinking about how effective this would be compared to the other scenes within the film and so I wanted to make it more powerful.

The other scenes are all very shocking and they each have their own style - eg. the "Shining' moment in the period scene, the timelapse used in the breastfeeding, and the dreamy sequence-like montage in the grapefruit scene.

During our meetings with Andy Wood we've talked about traditional advertisements and the medias views on women, so this got me thinking about doing a shaving commercial spoof. Usually female shaving commercials have women shaving already hairless legs, so I wanted to do the opposite. 

Gillette Venus Shaving Commercial (see 0:22)

I'd been growing out my leg hair, so it was a perfect opportunity to film a spoof, with my fully grown-out legs. We did a wide shot to show that it was in fact a womans leg and not a mans, as well as a close up of the razor at work.

Filming the grapefruit and the shower scene

Today we filmed both the grapefruit scene and the period blood shower scene.

I think that both scenes went really well and we got exactly what we needed.

We used red grape juice and undiluted ribena for blood.

More Behind The Scenes Photos

Related work

I came across this article on buzz feed which is quite similar to aspects of our film so we used it as inspiration -  Buzzfeed Link

It includes a link to a girls Instagram who has taken photos like this:

Update on the edit

This is a rough cut of the bed sheet scene at the start of the fim.
I had some technical difficulties so I couldn't export the film so I had to record it on my phone (hence the talking in the background)

Instagram account update

I've been posting regularly to our Instagram page for the film to try and give it some attention and gather people who might be interested in watching it when it's completed.

By going through and following accounts of female artists, strong women etc i've managed to gather quite a few followers.

I have also been reposting (with permission) photos from other artists accounts and labelling it "inspo. So far this has gathered more attention to the account and more followers, and also keeps up with the aesthetic of the account which brings in more followers.

I've linked my university email as a contact and the film's Facebook page as the website.