Development

When I pitched my idea to Cat at the start of the unit, it was still a mess and I didn't have a solid plan. My original plan was to do a cinematic day shoot for the first half of the video, with the sun flickering and shutting off as a transition, and abandoned houses for the second half. The beach and the forest alongside abandoned houses were the locations I had in mind for the second half of the video during the shoot. This was still a very rough idea in my development process, and it wasn't a particularly good one. As I presented the concept to Kat, she seemed to like it, but there was some fine-tuning that needed to be done.

Following the pitch, Kat advised me on the locations and types of shots that would work well in the shoot. We decided that rather than having several off locations such as the beatch and the forest, I should focus on just one type of location, which was the forest, and as a result, I chose to shoot in the Cobham area, which has large woods surrounding it. The abandoned house concept was still on the table, but I began to back away from it because finding the right location would have been extremely difficult in the short amount of time we had for pre-production. During the pitch, Kat suggested that I do a time-lapse of the sunrise and some of the landscape. She also suggested that I use a macro lens to capture smaller objects like raindrops on the leaves.

When it came time for shoot week, I only made a few minor changes, the most significant of which was the decision to use an abandoned structure. As I was looking into abandoned buildings, I realised that finding a good location or even getting permission to shoot at one would be difficult, so I decided to make a horror sequence out of the same locations that will be used for the cinematic portion of the video, using colour grading and some after-effects.

The rough cut edit that I did was interesting, but not in a positive manner. I only gave myself a short time to complete the rough cut edit, and while the result was not ideal, it gave me an idea of what it may look like and what emotions I could elicit just through music and sound effects. Although the edit was simple, it was structured in the manner in which I wanted my final cut to appear. The flow of the first half of the video was excellent, and the section of the edit came out brilliantly thanks to the combination of clips and music; nevertheless, the transition and the second half of the video did not work. This was primarily due to the clip selection and the lack of colour grading in the edit; without any colour grading, the music alone would not have sufficed; it just did not capture the feelings that I was attempting to achieve.