One of our modules at Salford is “Advanced Television Production”, where we are required to produce a short film of any kind, with high production value and technique. Groups for this assignment are limited to 3 members, but since Bryn, Daulta and Josh don’t own their own drone, I was roped in to help with their film “The Broken Road”.
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The film is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where civilisation has broken down and survivors must travel countless miles of wilderness scraping ways to survive. The location of filming was Mam Tor in Castleton, Peak District. This was due to a literal broken road that fell into disrepair in the late 70s and looks perfect for the story we’re trying to tell.
My role was runner, but mostly I was the Drone Operator. They needed a short establishing shot of the mountains and scenery. I used my DJI Phantom 3 Professional which downstreams a live preview to your phone attached to the controller. Sadly for some unknown reason the downstream was buggy and frequently cut out, meaning I was piloting the drone blind. This heavily affected my flying and the shots I captured.
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Thankfully, the footage saved to the onboard SD card was not corrupt in any way, and we got some amazing shots. The weather was ideal for flying, although the wind picked up a lot as I flew to higher altitudes. Thankfully my drone coped fine and landed safely.
Finally, our crew photo from the day! I’m excited to see how the final edit turns out and I’m glad to have been part of it.
#CMPSalford
Marcus Brooks, PSVT Year 2, Creative Media Production
“The Broken Road” by Daulta Brennan, Bryn Williams and Josh Baker
Above is the inspiration for this project. Madeon is a French electronic music producer and someone that I’ve been a fan of for a long time, having seem him live twice performing his debut album Adventure and his recent single in collaboration with Porter Robinson. His mashup track “Pop Culture” is one of his earliest works and what he is most famed for, where he remixes 39 songs live using a Novation Launchpad.
I do not own a Novation Launchpad and prefer to work with video anyway. While racking ideas and yoyo-ing concepts with my friend Phil, he came up with the idea of mashing up a series of memes and internet videos to the beat of Madeon’s Pop Culture. Being the fan of Madeon that I am, I’m surprised I didn’t think of this sooner.
For this project, I decided not to remix visuals for the entirety of Madeon’s track, instead working with no more than half of the song. Keeping the video short I felt would help the joke to stay strong and fresh. The original remix being built of short clips from various songs, there’s a strong “glitch-hop” feel to the track, where vocals are mashed to create new sounds. I decided to try to pair these sounds with clips from memes and internet videos that I felt closely matched the original track.
Myself and Phil listened to the track, racking our brains trying to make the sounds match with what we’ve remembered watching over the years. Once we had a good foundation, I was left to think of more sources, focussing on the edit.
For editing, all that was required was simple cutting, time stretching and some basic chroma keying of greenscreen artefacts, so I opted to use Sony Vegas. A program not so much used in industry, but heavily used in online media and meme culture. Plus other programs like Premiere and Media Composer seemed too advanced for the task at hand.
Looking at the image above, you can appreciate the level of detail there is in this project. This timeline only shows half of the full video, where in many cases audio has been separated from video to better fit the original soundtrack. Time stretching and pitch shifting of audio has also been used.
The above freeze frame combines two memes in one using chroma keying. The dog (Gabe) was an internet sensation through 2016 due to the sound of his barks and his adorableness. Sadly, Gabe has since died and his fanbase is in mourning. To honour Gabe, duding the “missing you” part of Madeon’s remix, it seemed fitting to blend the Shooting Stars meme and Gabe in astral form together, timing his barks (or borks as more widely referred to) with the beat of the track.
There is a lot that can be said about each edit decision and each reference made in this video, but given there are 25 sources of media (26 including the soundtrack, and 64 including all the original songs within Madeon’s mashup) I feel a full analysis would never do justice.
Here is the finished video, and my submission for the PSVT CMP Remix Assignment:
Assignment 1 tasked me with creating a 1 minute mobile video utilising one or more video apps. The video could be based on anything using any format I wanted, so long as I was limited to my smartphone being the only capture device.
My first concept was to create a hyperlapse/montage. Using my phone suction mount in my car (usually used for Google Maps) I’d record my daily commute with a first person perspective to and from where I work part-time around Uni.
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While filming, I decided the project was a bit bland and that I could do better. My second idea was to recreate something I’d done before, keeping the POV theme. I decided to mount a smartphone to a cap allowing me to head mount my phone, creating a Real Life First Person Shooter video, mimicking the FPS video game genre.
Above is my original attempt back in 2012. It went well (if you ignore the weird compression artifacts) but 5 years on I feel I can do a lot better. Me and my budding actor friend David planned to film a Campaign Mission from a FPS video game, where the POV character (me) would recover important data from a crashed drone, captured by the enemy (David). Annoyingly, upon arriving at the scene with everything ready, the heavens opened.
Back in the house, we decided to have a rethink, shooting something entirely inside that wasn’t necessarily in first person. While racking our heads for ideas, David suggested we reenact a written joke from the internet. We found a joke, and got to work!
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Having not planned to film inside, we didn’t have a tripod with us. We decided to fashion one by taping together long objects and piling chairs on one another. It seemed to work ok.
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“The PowerDirector Bundle Version” Android app allowed me to try colour grading, before uploading what we shot to my PC where I’d then edit and render. The use of colour grading gives my mobile video gives it that “filming” look, you sometimes forget this was even filmed on a phone!
#CMPSalford
Marcus Brooks, PSVT Year 2, Creative Media Production
Assignment 1 (Individual), “Love Hurts” Short Film (shot on LG G5)
Barrel Scrapers 