What an amazing week I had with my fellow film making community, Filmonik.

During my time at the summer filmmaking Kabaret I helped edit a Rap music documentary for a lady called Christina, I composited two tricky shots within a short first person film created by a talented director Kenneth James and lastly I got to shoot and direct my own short film that I wrote called The Damsel in this Dress which I intentionally created to incoporate comic book style video editing and the need for visual effects in mind to enhance the story.

The film I wrote is divided into three chapters, Chapter 1: The Confrontation, Chapter 2: The Crazy Date, and Chapter 3: Farewell Forever, this is because it's supposed to represent chapters within a comic book. The title sequence will actually be an animated comic book opening to show the first scene of the film.

I also wrote the film with the intention to add visual effects such as laser beams, explosions and 3D motion tracked comic book style thought bubbles. The edit will consist of many slide transitions to represent that comic book style vibe as you can see below from a rough cut.

Shooting whilst avoiding the bad weather.

Here's a list of three issues that my film crew and myself had to overcome in order to create this complex short comic book film.

1. Lack of lighting equipment and bad weather:

Couldn't use my green screen during production.

Due to budget restraints we had no lighting which made using my green screen backdrop practically impossible, coupled with the fact that the weather was so bad that we couldn't even shoot green screen footage outside in the bright sun light because there was hardly any reliable sun light to begin with and one major scene that took place was within a dark alley way.

In order to overcome those limitations I shot all the complex VFX shots using only a tripod, camera and measuring equipment.

I made sure that I wrote down any necessary information regarding the shot and then recorded the live action footage twice with and without the actors and/or props. This method gave me a blank slate to work from plus a shot that contained the actors.

The one shot for example involved a victim being shot by a blast from a sci-fi gun causing him to explode into blue dust

2. Lack of lighting during indoor scenes:

In order to keep as much detail within the shot as possible without lighting we used prime lenses with low apertures ranging from 1.4 to 2.2 f-stop. This let us shoot easier in low light conditions.

Shot Inside a bar with no additional lighting.

During production both myself and another camera operator made sure to use the lights that were on location to our advantage such as placing the actors underneath lights that were already present within the room.

Luckily the scene we shot was inside a bar that had loads of lighting to help us.

I loved how everyone collaborated during the various productions at filmonik including my own even when things get tough and boy do things get tough.

3. No audio equipment:

Without a shotgun mic and boom pole we could not shoot audio during production especially during bad weather conditions. That's why it was planned to use ADR, audio dialogue replacement to record the dialogue separately. We still recorded sound during production but none of the sound was usable.

At Filmonik your tasked with making a film to show at a public screening mere days after shooting and editing. We recorded sound in a make shift sound proof space. It wasn't perfect and in the future I knew that ADR will be recorded again in a much quieter sound proof location.

Foam to sound proof a small space for recording audio.

Below are some stills taken from the production of my short film The Damsel in a Dress. I can't wait to begin adding visual effects and motion graphics animation to my freelance production.

Turning this script to screen was no easy endeavour.

Hero pointing the finger at the masked villain.

The evil Doctor Blue with Vicky the Dame

It's a Western  Showdown. — It's a Western Showdown.