Final Film- Into The Woods

Into The Woods final cut from SHU Film & Media Production on Vimeo.

Budget

Below is a table with sources and costs of all props and everything bought for the five minute film. We originally had a £500 budget for the Art department and I only want to spend between £50-£60 for the five minute film and as you can see it's gone way over budget and I think this is due to the last minute change in story, adding a character in and therefore having to order things on express delivery due to time. We have less that £400 left for the main project now, I just hope it will be enough. I will have to start fighting my corner more and saying no to things that aren't going to be plausible or viable.

Item	Source	Cost
1x mask	Amazon	£9.37
12x bamboo torches	Amazon	£33.00
Brown monk robe	Selly joke	£15.00
2x Black fabric spray paint	Homebase	£9.98
30x Table tennis balls	Decathlon	£4.50
Greenhouse sulphur candle	B&Q	£4.99
talc powder	Superdrug & co op	£6.70
lighter fuel	Pound stretcher & Amazon	£18.06
food colouring	Sainsbury’s	£3.00
chocolate sauce	Sainsbury’s	£1.29
2x Tate and lyle golden syrup	Sainsbury’s	£2.30
2x Pigs head	Devonshire street Butchers	£6.00
lantern	Luke's	free
Dagger	Joel's	free
Black robe	Joel's	free
spike	Amy's	free
	Column1	Column2
	Total	£114.19

Production Stills 20th November

We all got ready for this last day of shooting and I was really ready to get this over and done now as we were meant to be finished last week. Luckily enough most of the set was still intact thankfully and all I had to do is bring a few more leaves down, put the spike in draw the symbol, put the pig's head on the spike, bloody everything up and pop the torches out, which didn't take too long at all. No one had a break this time as we lost a fair bit of time when we stopped for lunch last week which worked out better.
For better breakdowns of what I have done in the ritual scene please look at pages 11-13.

 

      

Production Stills 13/14th November

Shoot started today and thankfully all of the props had arrived but with all first days, there was always something bound to go wrong and it did in the shape of one of our crew members. He had not woken up and unfortunately I was storing most of the props at his house so I had to stay behind and go and find him. That set us back a lot of the day but luckily the lads managed to get all of the shots that didn't require the character in. 

On the 14th it was pretty clear we just needed the shots with the character and the ritual today and it did seem achievable this time as we were all there on time and ready to go and the set had been completed early on in the day but it never happened. I think that Jord and Luke kept getting shots that weren't on the shot list, they were extras and therefore we lost too much light and couldn't film it anymore. This was a problem, it means that we're going to have to shoot on another day even though we only had this scheduled as a two day shoot. I have had a chat with Jordan and Paul and we all agree that the shots that are remaining on the list are the shots to get first. So basically the ritual scene and any pick-ups, focus pulls and cut-aways can be gotten after. 

 

 

   

Smoke Bombs.

The smoke effect Jord wants for the film is for the lantern but also for smoke travelling across the floor. I did have a chat with him about doing that in after effects but he's 100% sure he wants the smoke on set in real time so it moves authentically with the wind, which I thought was fair enough and this gave me a chance to make it more of an experiment after all as I had never made anything like that.

I looked online first and wanted to find the cheapest and easiest way to do it and the first thing I had seen was to drain the yolk out of an egg, fill it with flour and then you literally just throw it. Although it was a good explosion, it didn't last for very long and very soon the cloud of flour had been taken away with the wind.

After realising this I asked around in fancy dress shops with no luck until a store worker had pointed me towards B&Q where they do a sulpher dioxide candle and it supposedly slow burned. I purchased one to try out and it looked promising but the smoke was virtually clear, and extremely toxic and it didn't fit inside the lantern so I had to go back to the drawing board. But secretly I was quite relieved it didn't work because it was quite expensive for what it was.

But finally I found the solution and it was cheap and extremely easy to make. I trawled youtube to see if there were any helpful videos on the issue and I came across one video that showed me how to me smoke bombs with table tennis balls and tin foil, cheap and easy just what I wanted but did it actually work? so I tried it out on set before we needed it. you simply wrap the tin foil around the table tennis ball make sure you leave a sort of chimney for the smoke to escape. Once I knew it worked I went and bought 3 packs of the cheapest table tennis balls from Decathlon at £1.49 for a pack of ten. Below there is a video of how it turned out.

Blood.

For this project, I made two batches of blood. The first one I followed from a recipe off the internet and it was completely rubbish. The colour was ok, but in terms of thickness it was close enough to water. So I decided to just make it up and see how it turned out and thankfully it went well and the density of it turned out to be just right. The ingredients I used to make my blood were:

2x tins of golden syrup

boiling water

red food colouring

chocolate sauce

blue food colouring.

This managed to make about a litre's worth of blood and that will be plenty for the shoot I think.

Updated Prop List

This is the updated and final props list ready for the shoot on 13/14th Nov.

Lantern

Mask

Robes

Ski mask

Boots

Smoke

Dagger

Spike

Beacons

Blood

Talc (symbol)

Pigs head