Ok so we were then made to put the voice over in once we received it and have chosen to put it together as one video. Above is the finished project. While I liked the individual episodes and thought they carried well without the voiceover I do think that this is an improvement and am pretty happy that we got the chance to put it in.
Here are the final mini episodes of our riot shield escapades;
‘Santa Pays A Visit’
‘Women?’
‘Need Banana!’
‘Bird Poo!’
‘Goalie!’
‘Outtakes’
As a whole I’m pretty pleased with how these videos have turned out, but that’s not to say that they are exactly as we had planned them to be. Originally the main focus of the videos was to be the voice over, which due to complications we didn’t receive in time to edit it in before the deadline, hence the use of extra titles in some of the final videos to help it to make a little more sense in terms of what is happening in each of the videos.
We worked well as a group and managed to overcome a lot of hurdles in terms of the problems that we came across; although minor they did take a bit of reworking and reorganising. We changed a lot of our scenes from the original script due to prop and actor availability, for example we lost the mother-in-law scene as we did not have anyone old enough to play this part within our group so replaced it with an ‘obnoxious friend’, played by me, but (luckily) this got cut out as it didn’t really make much sense when we edited it together.
I would quite enjoy to do this project again and make some more riot shield episodes as it was really fun to do and we had a good time doing it, as it didn’t really feel like we were doing work, just that we were messing around and happened to be filming it and I think that this helped in our production and all getting it done. While we were told at the start that our group size would be somewhat of a hinderance we found that it worked really well for us and we managed to produce a lot of work between us while still giving each group member their fair share of work to do. Fun times.
This is what we like to call ‘Alpha’, or rather what Max likes to call ‘Alpha’, but that’s besides the point. It’s the first edit of our viral video, no voice over thus far but you can get the gist of it.
I think the plan from here is to pester Chance until the voice over is done and I think we’re also going to be uploading each scene individually to create a series of webisodes on the ‘Riot Shield!’, time will tell.
We’ve got some pretty epic outtakes too.
Our storyboard was drawn up by Sam and is pretty good in my opinion. Here’s the general round up of what the scenes are, there are some more detailed/zoomed in shots on Sam’s blog (I didn’t put them up because it took too long to load on my laggy Internet!)
Because we have quite a large group we need to do some justifications as to what input we all gave to the project and what jobs we did;
Myself – Zombie make up, filming the zombie scene, ‘acting’ in the watermelon scene, filming the watermelon close-ups, and editing,
Chance – Directed most of the scenes, co-scripted, acted in the watermelon and zombie scenes, filmed the sports, santa and bird poo scenes,
Evan – Acted in the food/kitchen scene,
Sam – Acted in the santa scene, made storyboards, filmed the watermelon scenes, acted in the zombie scene,
Max H - Acted in the zombie scene and bird poo scene, editing, filmed the santa scene and sports scene,
Alex – Acted in the sports scene and zombie scene, filmed the watermelon scene, directed a few scenes,
Kat – Provided a santa suit and watermelon, filmed and directed the food/kitchen scene,
Felix – co-scripted, provided ‘Matilda’ the riot shield, acted in the zombie and santa scenes,
Max L – directed the food/kitchen scene
We’ve now done all of our filming and here’s some photos to show us hard at work doing everything:
And thanks to Alex Campbell, Luke Wakeford, James Yeo, Juno Jakob and Dommi Kerley for letting us use them as zombies!
Chance and Felix set about writing the script for our video and the voice over is to be done by Chance. So, this is our script (lifted from Felix‘s blog).
[ext.] Shot of street, a woman walks past a man and brushes against him. This causes her to sneeze on him, he looks at the marks on his coat in disgust cue narration
Narrator: Tired of taking this crap? Sick of getting pushed around, you need…RIOT SHIELD!
[ext.] The same scene, where the woman walks past him again, except this time when she sneezes he raises the riot shield blocks her sneeze and pushes her away. This causes her to fall back over a low wall.
Narrator: See how he kicked her ass? With the Riot Shield, you’ll be able to KICK ASS LIKE THIS GUY! This shield doesn’t just block, it does so much more…
[ext.] A man in a suit is hurridly trying to get to work but a crowd of people blocks his path. He has a face of desperation
Narrator: This guys late for work, does he take it like a man? Hell no! He uses RIOT SHIELD!
[ext.] Cuts to the same scene where this time he begins to run towards the crowd with a Riot Shield. The scene cuts to black just as he reaches them, and you here the sounds of chaos as it is obvious he is smashing his way through. The scene then comes back and we see him on the other side of the crowd who have all been pushed to the ground, one of the men looks up shocked at him.
Narrator: Oh, was that his boss he just Riot Shielded? Well…WHO’S THE BOSS NOW? RIOT SHIELD IS!
[ext.] Cuts to a street scene. A man is walking down the street with a Riot Shield on his back. A bird flies over and he looks up to see a “shadow” descending towards him. Just as its about to hit him, the camera freezes.
Narrator: You’re walking down the street and you get assaulted. Not by a person, but by fecal matter. Bird crap, horse crap, cow crap, dog crap. Cant take the abuse, BULL CRAP! Nothing beats Riot Shield!
[ext.] The camera resumes but he stops the crap just in time.
[int.] Cuts to a girl screaming at man inside a house (more specifically a lounge). He’s trying to ignore her but he cant take it anymore so he raises his shield up and her shouting is drowned out. He then continues to watch TV whilst she continues to shout at him.
Narrator: Hot wife, giving you lip? Her time of the month? Then no worries! Riot Shield has anti menstruation technology. MENSTROLOGY TECHNOLOGY!
[int.] There’s a table where dinner has been laid on for a dinner party. The guests are having a good time apart from the man, who is having a hard time from a woman who repeatedly points back to his wife. She is obviously his mother in law. He put his face into his hands and sighs.
Narrator: Now what’s worse than a torrent of needless blood and abuse?! Mother in Laws! Giant mother in laws, GIANT MAWS! Maw giving you a migraine, push her off YOUR property with the RIOT SHIELD!
[int.] The mother in law is still nagging, the man stands up resolutely and picks up his riot shield. He then proceeds to push her out of the house and onto the street.
[ext.] Cuts a garden. The wife is still having a go at her husband. In her rage, she picks up watermelons and throws them violently her husband. He defends himself with the Riot Shield.
Narrator: Riot Shield protects against all kinds of massed food attacks. Mashed potato, apples, cabbages, pies, bricks and even WATERMELONS! RIOT SHIELD!
[int.] Its a still shot of a lounge, santa claus is trying to get into a house for christmas. He gets out from the fireplace and stands up and begins to walk to the door. A man with Riot Shield is in his way, Santa smells something and with a look of fear runs back towards the fire place and gets into the chimney.
Narrator: Annoying round red objects still getting you down? Colorful overly joyful Buddhist hobo’s trying to break in every winter? Good news. Riot Shield has a coating of Bad Santa repellent, BANTAPELLENT!
[ext.] It is a scene of horror. The world is portrayed (albeit poorly) as a zombie infested apocalyptic place where the apparent last man is standing watching as a horde of zombies comes towards him. As they approach he unslings his Riot Shield and proceeds to beat them back.
Narrator: When the unthinkable happens and the streets are full of hungary, mindless, flesh eating zombies. Protect yourself with RIOT SHIELD!
[Final Shot] Its now a shot of the Riot Shield on display with payment information shown. Jokes are made such as the price is $9.99 but the shipping is $400 and the deal is only in effect for the next 10 seconds.
Narrator: RIOT SHIELD! GET IT NOW! Warning, does not actually protect against riots. Call now or you chance will be lost forever, Riot Shield are not responsible for any harm you may and probably will incur from using the Riot Shield product because quite frankly your an idiot.
Inspiration can strike in odd ways, especially when it concerns Alex and Max having a conversation. It also makes you a little worried. While we liked our video idea beforehand we thought that perhaps we were putting to much effort into it and it wasn’t really ‘viral’ anymore.
With the release of ‘Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2′ and Alex‘s new found obsession with riot shields it was decided that it would be really fun to have a fight with riot shields in real life. Cue the idea being brought up again a week later, this time with Felix‘s addition of “I have a riot shield”.
We then decided that we definitely wanted to do something involving riot shields. Then, in some convoluted manner, this came into the equation:
And that was our idea sorted, we wanted to make a viral video to advertise a riot shield, and all the situations in which it could be very useful indeed. A lot of excitement and being told off for being too loud came very shortly after.
We thought a little more about our viral video yesterday and I think we are pretty much set on an idea that we want to do. However, the idea is floating around about making more than one video but I don’t know how successful that will end up being as our main idea requires a lot of work and effort so I think that we should focus mainly on that for the time being and then think about doing other stuff for fun.
So, for our main idea what we’re going to do is make somewhat of a compilation of viral videos. Which is probably the worst description ever. We’re having a group of people sitting around a table and they get somewhat ‘taken over’ by viral videos and then all they can say are lines from viral videos. I think there will need to be other lines that aren’t from virals in order to make it work coherently but I think that it is something that could end up being quite good. In terms of camera angles etc they will probably mostly be medium close ups of each of the individual actors when they are saying there lines, intercut with shots as an entire group. I think we’re also having a few walk-on parts for some of the more ‘throw-away’ virals, for lack of a better term.
But yes, viral, making, need to get started on filming and the like. We’ve all been assigned jobs in our group and I’m part of the ‘tech team’ so I’ll be making storyboards and filming and all that kind of thing, with Sam and Max.
Now that we’ve been put into groups the viral idea has become a bit easier because it’s now easier to do a bigger idea. We got together as our group on Tuesday and started a little mind map of what sort of things we wanted to make:
- improvised/choreographed dance
- line of dominoes with a button that does something completely unrelated
- public stunt set up early in the morning
- trying to beat a world record; problem with needing someone present but could provide some inspiration
- parody/pastiche of pre-existing virals
- seagulls from ‘Finding Nemo’
- busking as an air band
- performance art
- American football
- Scooby Doo style chase sequence
- bouncy balls
- Eiffel 65 – Blue (Da Ba Dee Da Ba Di) make a literal version
- art/paint fight
- busking with Guitar Hero instruments
On Tuesday we’re going to review these ideas again and see what it is we want to do to then storyboard it and go through all the relevant health and safety factors and take into consideration what we need to include with regards to props, actors, number of cameras and just thoroughly plan the project through.
