Greatly Troubling Anxiety

After busy couple of weeks of planning, shooting and editing, we can happily present our final Creative Media Production project: Greatly Troubling Anxiety. The film is an interactive story about the perils of social interaction, as well as a parody of the popular video game series Grand Theft Auto. There are multiple story-lines and endings you can pick, and although

On sight in the woods outside Bolton

 there is a ‘correct’ ending, even the bad endings were written to be fun. The aim was to make the film repayable, not actually story-driven.

Everyone was able to contribute in their own way, bringing their own specialties to the table. Marcus used his drone for the overhead shots as well as playing the role of protagonist, Bryn directed and kept everyone on track, Josh compiled the footage and assumed role of Editor while Dualta laid down the beats you can hear during the film.

The trickiest part of this project by far was the edit. Each scene had to be sorted according to the different choices the viewer could pick, not to mention the many, many graphics added in post. Many of these little touches were meant bring the film closer to the video-game style we were looking to mimic such as the drone zoom-ins, loading screen transitions, and HUD overlays.

As part of the Grand Theft Auto aesthetic, colour digital graphics were produced. This ranged from trying to emulate the famous Grand Theft Auto font and create a logo for the project. To also creating personalized loading screens featuring all members of the team digitally painted by Josh. These custom graphics/animations served not only to help bring the edit together but to also mirror the iconic Grand Theft Auto loading screen art which even to this day is still a staple for their fans.

Time allocated to graphics production also had to be split into end slates, that would signify to the player(viewer) that they’d made it to some form of fail state or that they had managed to navigate the winding branches to reach the ‘true ending’. We wanted to place more importance on replay ability and enjoying the journey rather then the destination. This meant that not only in the writing stage but also during graphics production that we wanted humour and viewer curiosity to drive them through the project multiple times.

After coming up with the idea for the film we decided we needed theme music. Dualta, being the music maker in the group, was tasked with the production of a track. This was achieved using Cubase Pro and a myriad of differing samples, plugins and processors.

To start with, just like most tunes Dualta makes we begin with a kick drum, then a snare and some percussion. EQ’ing as we go on each and every track. And also getting the basic rhythm of the tune down immediately so you can gain a feel for the tempo etc. For all Dualta’s eq work he uses the FabFilter series as the visual graphics they provide and the spectrum analyzer on the eq themselves, it’s incredibly easy to identify unwanted frequencies and remove them as you please. In the end though Dualta went slightly crazy on this one with about fifteen to twenty separate different hat and shaker tracks. He found the flute samples pretty early on in the process of creating this tune and we were very happy with the distinctive melody they bring to the tune, and allows us to create instant audio recognition in the cutscenes with a quick run through of 4 or 8 bars.

For the bass line and sound fx he used a combination of the Native Instruments Massive plug in which is an incredibly powerful wavetable software synthesizer which can basically do anything you need a synth to do, Spectrasonics Omnisphere which is an absolute beast of a sample based synthesizer and last but not least the Serum Xfer wavetable synth which by no means is inferior to Massive. All three of these combine to make probably all the software synths you could ever need.

“Overall I think the music worked very well for the intro titles and I very much enjoyed writing the music and editing it for this project, this is something I can hopefully do a lot more of in the future I hope you enjoyed it.” – Dualta

Finally, we decided to go for a silly ending that would be reminiscence of a video game easter egg, complete with a cheesy 50’s sci-fi tracker beam. A final touch for anyone who managed to actual beat our dumb film.

Overall, we had great fun making the film – even after editing hell. If we had more time we would’ve added more variety to the options in the film and perhaps added more graphics in post, but we’re all very happy with how the film came out in the end.

Enjoy!

Proper Planning

Before we can even think about putting our final CMP assignment together, we had to think about planning. As the film was to be interactive, th
ere was a lot of organisation involved. This was more than just storyboards and shot lists however; we needed a full flowchart to help visualise the different plot lines and options possible when playing through the film.

Branching Storylines

We wanted each play-through to be unique and encourage the viewer to play again in case they missed anything, so there are many different stories that could unfold. Although there are also some plot lines that will lead to the same location (i.e. if you choose to run away from two different encounters, they both follow into the same wilderness scene).

The main focus was to try and write varying storyline branches that would keep the viewer entertained and returning to see more, rather than create an actual competitive game.

It was at this point we decided on a title for our project: Greatly Troubling Anxiety.

Google document compiling possible interactive video sites

Further more we had to take into consideration how we planned to implement the interactive elements of this video project. Research began into different methods of producing this. Very quickly it became apparent that although there are lots of sites and companies are offering interactive video solutions, that not all would be appropriate for us, and unfortunately that most limited the number of views you could have or required monthly pay subscriptions.

Hence we looked further into one of, if not the most popular video sharing website on the internet, Youtube. During this investigation/test runs we found that Youtube annotations would be changing from the 2nd May but that all videos uploaded before this would keep there annotations. This reassured us that not only could we show our work to a larger audience but that it would continue to work long after change came to the site.

Shooting the Film

After all that boring organisation, we were finally ready for the fun part. Filming took place over several days, in a variety of locations. These
included the park, our house, the shops, a fast food, and by far our favourite – the woods. During the shoot Bryn took the lead as director, ensuring all scenes were shot as originally intended. Josh was the lead camera-op, although everyone took a turn at one point. Marcus was mostly acting for this project, but his drone-training was invaluable for capturing some amazing aerial shots. Dualta was happy to score the film, composing some original beats.

Filming Greatly Troubling Anxiety was great fun and much less stressful than some other projects we’ve worked on. 11/10 would film again.

Brainstorming

For our final Creative Media Production assignment we were tasked, as a group, to make one of the following: an interactive video, a crowd-sourced project, or simply a short film. The catch was we only had four weeks to write, plan, shoot and edit it all. The Barrel Scrapers team started throwing ideas around straight away.

Originally our plan was to just to make a short film that utilized Point-Of-View angles to simulate an every-day conversation between two people. From the start, we wanted to make a film about social anxiety (with a comedic touch of course), taking inspiration from such shows as Peep Show.

Peep Show uses entirely Point-Of-View angles to portray the social misadventures of two flatmates, with often ridiculous yet mundane consequences. A common style of humour in British television, ‘awkward’ comedy can also be found in shows like The Office or I’m Alan Partidge. This was the tone we wanted for our film’s narrative.

We wanted to more with the idea though – something more immersive into our own protagonist’s social interactions. Soon we decided the film could very easily be adapted into an interactive one, where the viewer decides what sort of ridiculous situations the character will get into.

When YouTube first introduced annotations, videos like Interactive Zombie Movie Adventure where viewers could choose options that influence the story,  began to appear. We put a pin in this method of interactivity, but wanted to explore other options before settling on YouTube annotations.

However as the project went on, we stuck with Peep Show‘s cynical, awkward comedy but moved away from the POV concept. We considered going further with interactive movie idea and pushing the film closer to an actual video-game, in all ways but one. This was in part due to our limited-access to POV equipment such as GoPro cameras, and our entirely unlimited-access to Marcus’ drone camera. The drone would let us shoot unique aerial angles that resemble the ones seen in such role-playing games as Grand Theft Auto.

Mimicking GTAs visual style matched the interactive element of the film well, as well as being very recognizable among many people in our general target audience – young people who use online media like YouTube. We also added elements of other similar video games such as Fallout 4‘s interactive conversation cutscenes.

Ideas were flying and we had our idea: an interactive video resembling the visual style of a video game like Grand Theft Auto, and written with the socially-awkward wit of British programmes like Peep Show.