R.E.D. Evaluation

R.E.D. Evaluation – Gareth Taylor

In this module I have attempted to cover various areas I’m particularly interested in developing which will eventually relate to my 2012 B.A. FMP.

As you will notice in within my on-line blog (http://garethtaylorred.blogspot.com) I have actually started my FMP as a long-term research project, whereby this R.E.D module picks up the early stages of the film’s development.

Having an idea in my head is one thing, getting that onto paper so to speak into something that makes sense is something I find very difficult, and with the lack of story writing/screenplay/scriptwriting  on the course I felt like a fish out of water.

So where did I start? I watched a number of films that inspire me – these were Taxi Driver, The Fighter and A History of Violence. Each of these films bring different aspects to the table.

To give a brief overview of why I’ve picked out these particular films, apart from the fact they inspire me; A history of Violence for the way it tells it’s story, The Fighter for Christian Bale’s acting of which is based on a real person whom he studied and worked with and Taxi Driver for it’s night-time cityscape scenes showing off the bright, multi-coloured lights associated with the night life of 1970’s New York. After re-watching these, it allowed my head to start the thought process of developing the story line and of course, character development –  which is something very important to me within this project and is in fact what I’m concentrating on in my Contextual Studies.

Once I’d worked out a basic plot I wrote a Synopsis, which is by no means a final draft – I wrote it more for me to keep going back to so I can develop the story further. Not only that but in order to start getting other people interested for crew purposes I needed something to show them.

One of my main concerns in the past has been shooting/filming in low light conditions and the problems that come with it, so for this RED module after considering different areas to concentrate on  I took the decision to research and develop this.  So, inspired by Scorsese’s 1974 film Taxi Driver I put together a plan which circled around the idea of filming at night within a busy city environment, with achieving the highest visual quality being the point. I have learnt from past experience that this can be hard to get right without the right equipment .

In order to put myself in the right environment I had to consider a suitable location. After some thought I decided the banks of the Thames in the evening would be an excellent place for the testing, for it has the night-time population, plenty of street lighting and also is somewhere I’m considering the FMP to be shot.

I chose to shoot with Digital SLR, however I wasn’t sure the Canon 7D was up to the job in low-light conditions so a large part of this researching was to see how the Canon 5D performed, being it’s big brother and renowned for it’s low-light performance. I recently took out a 5D anyway, finding I could photograph hand-held in the dark with a shutter of 20^th second and upto 4000 ISO and still get a good quality shot with minimal movement, so I was keen to see how this camera performed over a 7D in video mode. However, when I arrived on location the 7D was faulty and wouldn’t work – so this test was sabotaged, out of my control. Therefore the 5D MkII was used, without a rig, without a steadycam. I got a friend to operate the 5D whilst I directed and took up the role of a little acting just to give the scenes some sort of story that could string together in an edit.

Using a 35mm lens on a full frame dSLR allowed for a true 35mm angle, rather than a 1.8x crop you’d get using the same lens on the 7D body. With a wide aperture this allowed for good level of depth of field but at the same time a wide enough angle to stay close to the subject when required and to achieve a reasonably steady shot – as opposed to a longer lens, obviously, which would be a pain when attempting to follow an actor even when using a steadycam or rig of some description.

In reflection however, I do wished I’d have hired out a steadycam to smooth out the shots as a lot were very jerky, but at the same time the test was not about achieving a steady shot, it was about getting a high quality image with little or no grain – basically seeing if great optics were achievable in the environment I plan to shoot my FMP – and the answer is yes, very achievable using the 5D MkII from Canon, along with a fast, quality lens

As you can see near the start of this blog I have selected a clip from Taxi Driver, known as The Animals Come Out At Night which cleverly depicts typical night-life scenes of 1970’s NYC, what I wanted to achieve was getting similar high quality optics from a night scene, and I would say I have managed to do this which clearly has pleased me as I now know I can carry this off in my FMP.