Mobile Movie Making – the Silent Eye Diaries

Since January 2018, we have been shooting Silent Eye, an anthology of short science fiction stories. And we’ve been using smartphones.

We are now moving forwards with Episode 4: Museum of Me.

Locations

This episode has a bigger location challenge than previous ones, which were all shot in locations we got for free. This time we need to create a space that looks like a museum. To do that we decided to hire an art gallery in London and try to dress it up to look like a museum.

Hiring a gallery in London is not usually cheap. But we managed to find one at a reasonable price. But still more than I could personally afford. Added to that there is the cost of props, and travel and food expenses for the cast and crew. So we have been back on Kickstarter and managed to raise over £1600! And FiLMiC Pro came in at the end to get us over the line as they became our 2nd Executive Producers.

Now the hard work begins as we try to get everything ready in time for the shoot on March 4th, 5th and 6th.

Casting

We have already cast Henk Brugge to play the lead in this episode. He appeared as the client in Episode 3: The Unlocking Thought, although his only line was “uuhh”. Each story in the series normally contains different characters, but we wanted to have some characters crossing over so that the world of the series is more connected. The stories are different, but taking place in the same story world…

So Henk is the first actor to play a character in two episodes. Playing his wife will be Andromeda Godfrey.

VFX

It looks like this episode will have more VFX than previous episodes, as we try to create a kind of “museum of the future”. For that reason, we will probably shoot this episode with the smartphone (Samsung S9) camera more stationary. It’s much easier to add VFX when the camera is still compared to when the camera is jerking around. It can be done, but it just takes a lot more time.

Besides, as the whole story takes place in the museum, I think it would suit the story to have the camera less “hand held” than it has been in previous episodes. So, I’m looking forward to trying out a different style. I have also found it’s harder to use motion tracking with smartphone footage – and I think this might be because the image is compressed, which causes a loss of the information which the software uses to track motion.

VFX experts might be able to enlighten me…

Extra equipment

I’m looking to add some extra items to the equipment list for this shoot. For audio we have used a Sennheiser 416 shotgun mic. Last episode I added a Rode VideoMic Me as a backup mini shotgun. But I would like to add a good quality wireless lavalier or 2 as well.

One good thing about this episode is the whole thing takes place in one location, so no need to spend time travelling around to the next place. So, plenty to do with just over 4 weeks to go before we start shooting.

Meanwhile…

…we also have the festival to get ready. Right now, the jury are going through our pre-selected films and rating them. Andrea is busy keeping everything ticking along, getting the awards designed and made, talking to partners, talking to the venue hosting the festival, planning the schedule for the festival and so on.

We’re very excited to see what the jury thinks of your films, so we can announce this year’s Official MoMo selections.

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