Ten Second Film Festival - Introduction & Ideas

The time has come to start thinking about Assignment 2 - The Ten Second Film Festival. The task is to design, plan and prepare a Ten Second Movie for considered submission to www.tensec.com, a website for hosting ten second films.

The first step to creating the movie is actually coming up with ideas of what I might use for the film. After thinking carefully about what would be physically possible in ten seconds I came up with the following ideas:

Timelapse Movie
Animation
Narrative

Timelapse

A Timelapse movie is one where a long piece of footage is sped up so that it fits inside a shorter time bracket. For example, the easiest way to create this idea would to be find a nice big open space and film the sun setting or rising. This of course takes a lot longer than ten seconds, and could involve filming for nearly two hours (or sometimes longer!). With the camera recording in the same position for the duration of the sunset, the footage can then be edited to create the timelapse scene. The editing process isn't all that complicated. It is simply a case of trimming the clip and than time stretching it to fit inside ten seconds. Easy peasey! And it created impressive results.

Animation
A difficult choice to choose, but one that also has the potential to demonstrate a lot of different production and post-production (shooting and editing) techniques. The number of frames in one second (frames per seond, or fps for short) is between 24 and 30 (depending on which part of the world you're in and what format you're watching on), which means that do create an animation I would have to shoot between 240 and 300 still images, and then edit them together in quick succession.
Animation is very effective and I could create an impressive end product, but it means a lot of work. However, I have not ruled out this option just yet!

Narrative
My final idea was to create a narrative film. This would most likely be a short sketch with just two people. It would be very hard to create a good, catchy sketch with more than two people in the short space of time I have got to present it. By doing a narrative film I could demonstrate a range of different camera shots and techniques, and could vary my shots from wide shots to close ups. I could also use advanced editing techniques in post production, such as split screen, transitions, overlays etc.

My Choice

I have decided to choose the Animation idea, and I will be cutting the movie to a fast paced audio track. I am going to use Lego to create a Lego Club, and I will choose a variety of shots from different angles and shoot enough images to be able to cut the sequence to the beat of the music, which will be chosen at a later stage. Shooting will probably take place over a week period, because it will be hard to take all 240-300 images at once. I have thought about using just 12 frames per second, as this might be enough to create something effective. I will however decide the frame rate during my full planning stages, which you will be able to read in the near future.

Keep checking back for developments on the planning of my film! Hopefully within the next week I will have a storyboard completed, and know exactly what I want to film.