We started off discussing over what could be our possible remake. At first, we thought about making a comedy remake of actual 'box office - exploding' movies such as 'Star Wars' or 'The Avengers', 'Hunger Games' and etc. However, when coming to considering the costs and time we have to spend on it, these films are not easy to make. Not only we need to create a believable world of special effects, we need to put our efforts into finding costumes as well. That would be impossible to make perfect before our deadline. Therefore, we let go of the genre and decided to look up Romance films. I must admit, that Romance is not quite my type, but we came upon an agreement on remaking 'Warm Bodies'. There were not many characters. This served us well for we only have four people in our group.
My role
I worked mainly on focusing the camera and the camera works on spot. I told the actors their possible moves and adviced on improvements. In addition, I downloaded the soundtracks and handled all the recording works. One thing I realised from the earlier groups is that their sound quality can be improved in a way that looks more professional. From my earlier experiment with sound, I now know that 'sound' has an important role in creating mood, suspense, and tone - especially for action movies and horror films. Therefore, on Friday, I brought in my game casting microphone. Although not as professional as the ones they use in studios, it was still better than regular audio recorders with sounds of wind and unnesscessary ambients.
Evaluation
One thing we found difficult was to figure out specific roles for every member. All of us wanted to work on almost everything and were so eager to take on the whole job ourselves. However, we found out eventually that it doesn't meant to work that way. Work is most efficient with everyone collaborating and working in different areas, that makes teamwork (and time) more effective.
It is a zombie movie. Quite fantasy. With this in mind, we considered all our mise-on-scenes such as May's make up and Prima's blonde wig. Not only to create a sense of comedy, but these props portrayed the characters, allowing viewers to understand which role each person was playing.
We thought a lot about the reaction shots. IT'S A ZOMBIE! The scene where May walks towards a scared Prima shows our intention well, for we decided to switch between Prima's scared face and May's love-stunned expression. We further more enforce the idea that May had been love-struck by applying a beating heart right after she saw Prima. I think that it worked quite well.
Areas of Improvement
It was hard to find the perfect location for filming within the school. The story is quite apocalyptic, and there was nowhere we can think of in school that looks abandoned like ruined. It might be that we could possibly create a more convincing scenery to go with our story.
Another thing was that the coulour palette of the edited video was not scary nor convincing enough. True, the lockers are blue and the nerf guns are bright vivid orange and indigo, but it might have turned out abit more scarier. With our limited time span for the entire project, we did what we could to change the surrounding hues of the clips. It might be better if we spent more of our time on researching special effects in Premeire Pro and Adobe After Effects.
