While there will be a large amount of drawn material, there will still be a major presence for photographed images. For this, I used a DSLR camera as per the brief.
However, I did not use a Canon 7D as I'm sure most everyone else in the class did. Instead, I borrowed my father's Pentax K20 with SMC-DA 16-45 ED AL zoom lens, since he would be on hand to advise me on how to operate it, and thus get a grounding in how to operate DSLRs which I could apply to any other DSLR, since although how you perform an action will vary from camera to camera, exactly what you're doing remains the same. It may differ from a Canon 7D in how exactly you manipulate aperture size and shutter speed, but once you know what effect doing so will have on the image, it applies to every camera.
I picked the zoom lens since I was working with the unpredictability of the outdoors, so I had the option of an expansive wide angle, a focused narrow angle and everything in between. Although I didn't experiment much with the camera prior to shooting, something of a regret in hindsight, I found during shooting how to manipulate depths of field, so I achieved both scenes with a huge expanse in focus (such as the 'ordinary street' in the first scene'), scenes with elements picked out in front of an unfocused backdrop (such as the opening shot of the ruin scene), and even scenes with shallow depths of field but with the background/foreground focused reversed to the previous example (such as the shots looking through the fence up at the school in the penultimate scene).
The actual principle photography, excluding reshoots and the moving image sequence, took place on a single day. I had to wait for the weather to be clearer than it was in the morning, since I wanted the sharp, defined shadows that come hand in hand with sunlight to achieve more of an Expressionist, film noir look that was asked for. I was beginning to get worried that I wasn't going to get the 'appropriate lighting' required in the brief, since apart from the moving image sequence at the very end of the film, all the photographed segments were filmed outdoors, and the film noir style of lighting is only really achievable in a studio setting.
It didn't turn out as bad as I was expecting. The bright sunlight cast very stark shadows, notably at the final image taken in the graveyard, when the shadows and light moved in such a way that half of the angel was in shadow and the other lit, with the face split almost perfectly down the middle, achieving a very strong two-tone effect. Apart from lighting conditions, the shoot went off with no hitch, with very strong technical control, and achieving shots very quickly, effectively and efficiently.
Only two issues presented themselves. The first was that once I had a chance to go over the shots after the shoot, I realised the end of the ruin scene shoot was unusable. While the scene was perfectly fine in the first two thirds, the shots taken at the base of the hill and ascending it were ideal, once the top of the hill was reached the rest of the shots taken had been hideously overexposed by mistake, rendering them unusable. I had to reshoot in order to save the scene. I went out on another day to reshoot, and got the shots fine, but unfortunately it was a rainy day, and I had to hide in a bus shelter waiting for the rain to stop long enough to rush the third of a mile down to the ruin to quickly get the shots and hurry back. Thus, the lighting conditions were completely different, and it was very noticable when playing the reshoots in sequence with the original shots. I decided I would simply have to either wait for another sunny day, or just grin and bear it.
I got lucky. Since the Pentax K20 did not have a video feature, I had to get a 7D to shoot the moving image sequence. This is where my poor forethought came into play, since the 7Ds were all booked out when I realised I needed one and I couldn't book one since it was unclear exactly when there would be one available. I took to simply visiting the ERC every day to see if they had one. One day, they had one that had come back early, and I nabbed it for the day. By chance, that day happened to have almost identical weather conditions to the day of the original shoot, and the bus that takes me between my home and college passes very near to the ruin, so on a whim I decided to get off early and headed up to the castle for a second reshoot. As it turned out though, the shots I got weren't as impressive as the ones I had gotten from the first reshoot, since those had a visually striking effect where the auto-exposure slowed the shutter speed as I zoomed into the hole, thus making them blurrier as it moved in, giving an impression of movement. It wasn't a total loss though, as I used one or two shots from the second reshoot to bridge the gap between the original shoot and the first reshoot, and in the final film (unless you're actively looking for them) it's pretty seamless.
But that was just an extra bonus of the weather, the main focus of that day was in shooting the moving image sequence. This was the one indoor scene of the entire film, so I was adamant that it use stark, noir-ish lighting. Hell, it was key that the lighting look like that, since the entire point of the shot is that you see nothing but the character's outlined silhouette with a supernatural glow in his eyes. Originally I planned to achieve this by taking the lampshade off of my bedside lamp, placing it behind me (from the camera's perspective), which would result in the character being an outlined silhouette as intended. However, when it came time to shoot, before I underwent the hassle of trying to figure out how to remove the lampshade, I decided to test out what it would look like using only my desktop angle poise lamp. As I discovered, it was a far more stark, tungsten light than the bedside lamp, and the effect it gave was so in tune with what I intended for the shot I stuck with that instead.
It was still not perfect, though. I tried several variations with the light placed with me between it and the camera, with the angle poise angled at different positions. None of them were satisfactory, since it placed too much light and emphasis in the shot on the curtains, and it somewhat spoiled the mood being aimed for to have the character surrounded by a surreal curtain artwork that looked on-camera like a girly floral pattern (not to say all floral patterns are automatically girly, or that girly = bad, I'm just saying the way the abstract design looked on-camera wasn't very appropriate to the atmosphere I was trying to achieve). Trying different placements of the light, I found, ironically, placing it right in front and above me (out of shot on the left from the camera's perspective) was effective. One thing that hindered shooting was the fact that I was a one-man crew, so you can imagine how long it took and how hard it was to focus and light a shot on a DSLR where the only way to see what the camera sees is a fixed viewfinder on the back of the camera. After doing test after test to get the focus right, and adjusting the lighting as mentioned above, by chance I achieved what I wanted when I performed a take where I moved in such a way that the light illuminated my hoodie, but stopped almost precisely at the rim of the hood, giving a bright light over my head while leaving my face completely dark with some partially visible highlights at the side.
I originally planned to use black-out curtains so I could shoot during the day while simulating night, but as both the castle reshoot and other personal matters took up time, by the time I was ready to shoot it was so late that by the time I would have fished out the black-outs and installed them, it would have been dark anyway, so I just waited until after sunset, and shot then. The result was pleasibly noir-ish in how contrasting the lit areas of the shot were with the stark shadows, and I was overjoyed with the result.
The drawn segments had a much simpler production process. I simply sat in my room with the iPad, and over the course of a day drew all the images needed for the film. The only notable production issue was that I did some preliminary tests with ArtStudio, and as mentioned in Ideas and Research, Tests and Discoveries, found that drawing with my fingers was finicky, inaccurate and produced images of insufficient quality. After buying a stylus from HMV, that issue was mostly resolved. There was still accuracy issues, often it was hard to gauge exactly where you were drawing and would result in the line being anywhere up to a centimeter or two away from where you intended it to be. This was not too much of a problem though, since the beauty of drawing electronically is the absolute godsend that is the Undo button, so I could always have another go if I screwed up.
After that, all the images and video sequence were ready. It was time to edit.
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