This is a reflective report for my short film, “How to make an Alien.” In this report, I shall be reflecting on my work explaining the development processes, challenges and experiences leading to the outcome of the final piece.
For the assignment, our task was to create a 3 – 7 minute How-to short film that engages all the filmmaking elements of storytelling. This included using a variety of sound and film techniques that we learnt throughout the module, with added overlay writing to assist with the storytelling. I had many thoughts on how to tackle this project, my ideas stretched from “How to draw something” to “How to get rid of a monster.” These topics were really different from each other, I wanted to find an in-between so I mind mapped a few ideas branching off from both and came together with the plan of making a disgusting creature from scratch.
The creatures design was not really fully planned at first, there was a rough design with notes on how I imagined it would look like, my main focus was thinking about what materials to use and how I’m going to handle them. The materials that I ended up using were; Monster clay, Liquid Latex, Foam and Hot glue. These items were supported by a few other products like a Hair Dryer and a few paintbrushes for example. For the appearance of the monster, I mainly took inspiration from the youtube channel Will McDaniel. On his channel, he mainly creates small comedy sketches with some unsettling and disgusting creatures made from scratch that he brings to life, which is very fleshy and oozy, I wanted to capture these elements in my monster design.
The first shots of the short film started off angled above a table, the camera I used for this was from my phone. Within this segment, I filmed footage of me sculpting the main body of the creature in clay, this took about 3-4 hours to do because I had to sculpt the shapes and then smooth as I went. The most difficult part about the body construction was the connection of the clay, I found it harder as I added more to it, the weight of the creature became heavier and complicated to support. As a way around this problem, I ended up stuffing polystyrene that I found around the garage as inner support, this also helped me out later on when it hardened acting as a cushion on the inside so it doesn’t crack. Next, I moved onto applying the latex. The latex had to be applied in multiple layers and dried in between each to create a decent amount of thickness to the monster’s skin. Camera angles rotated between the front and side in these shots to show all the way round in different perspectives. After these scenes were shot I had to wait for everything to dry, this ended up taking up to a day.
The next day I started to connect all the pieces together. First, I started peeling the latex off of the model, this ended up being really hard to do as the skin kept ripping and getting caught in areas. To overcome this obstacle I had to take my time moving the edges slowly and lifting them up to the head, rips were also patched with extra pieces of latex. After this was done I added a little bit of baby powder to the inner of the skins shell, by doing this prevents stickiness and allows the stuffing to not get caught in areas. Stuffing the Alien was a bit of a challenge also because the foam kept jumping out of place, the only way to solve this was by making smaller chunks and stacking them into little areas. Then once the stuffing was in I created an extra small thin layer of latex to cover the bottom to stop it all falling out. Up to now, I had the basic structure of the monster made. I was liking the look of it at this point, the slimy and bumpy texture really captured the disgusting alien feel I was after. The only thing that I didn’t like was the way the foam expanded the skin, it ended up getting rid of textures and making the creature seem bloated.
Moving on, I went and applied the paint in a variety of different coats. The main colours that I used for this were reds, browns and yellows, creating a harmonious blend. Once the base colour had been applied I made a few contours in areas to define the body more, I enjoyed doing this part and got creative with the different types of darks making their edges pop. Camera shots here were the same as the beginning shots with it aiming down at the table, followed by another 2 – 3 hour time-lapse of me creating the colours. The only problem that I faced with this section of development was that my camera died over halfway through filming so I had to cut the timelapse rather short, this issue couldn’t really be solved as by the time I realised it died I had finished with the adding colours. To make up for this I ended up filming extra footage of using the hot glue gun, sticking it down to a piece of solid card to help fix the bloated appearance and make it more slime-like. After seeing the hot glue dry I realised that I could use it for more than just sticking things down, I used small strands and blobs of it to create a wet slime effect running down the body. This was perfect and really made me achieve the alien to look gross.
For the final shots, I wanted to make a little showcase showing the creation complete with different angles showing all sides. I took about 15 different shots in the end narrowing it down to 4 specific shots showing the front, side, back and result. The resulting shot was basically squishing and squashing the creature, I did this to give a sense of what it would feel like and so I could bring it to life by adding sounds. There was more footage in the left off after that, that didn’t make the final cut. This included an extra bonus scene of the alien waddling over to the clay version and having both go off into the distance. That scene didn’t really feel like it fitted in so I left it out. If I were to improve or change anything next time I would most likely change the camera and use a tripod as at times the video kept unfocusing making blurry clips. Overall filming took about 5 days to complete in end, I was happy with the amount of footage I got and was ready to start editing in the software Adobe Premiere.
Now onto the editing. This was the easiest part to do in my opinion as most of my clips were mainly time-lapsed so I had to speed up the video then trim certain sections. There was quite a lot of cuts ahead in the time-lapse, I did this to reduce the watch time on a specific area to make the video move along more swiftly. The only downside of doing this was that I cut out other potential parts that I could have used to make the video overall longer in duration. After all of the time-lapse was done, I made sure to order them correctly with the short clips in start to finish order. The shorter clips didn’t really need trimming much so that made it even easier to execute. Before I added the text overlay, I started to think about what type of music and sounds needed to be placed in the background. It had to be something not too upbeat and not too soft to get the video flowing along smoothly. I searched through many sound libraries and music videos not being able to find what I was after until I stumbled across one on the Adobe software, this ended up fitting rather well in my opinion. Once the music was picked I began matching and syncing it up with the video. The video would have been very plain I think if I had it all just the music so I decreased the sound levels in certain sections to add a little background sound, building some depth making it more than just visuals going across the screen.
For the text overlay, I decided to use the impact font in white with a slight border thickness of 2 points to make the clarity of the text clean. The transitions stretched from fading in and out to travel across the screen, timed exactly on the right targeted section. With the text, it provided a sense of direction in my opinion it allowed people to understand what’s doing on in the scene with ease. Duration of it isn’t too long or short, lasting on the segment long enough to read them. This part of the process took a small amount of time but a good chunk of it as I had to plan the phrases/sentences in a timecode format so I knew where and when on the timeline it would be placed. When everything was synced in the video I came across a massive problem, the overall duration leads to 2 minutes 33 seconds and it had to be at least 3 minutes long. I needed to add an extra 27 seconds to the video. To extend the time I used some of the other extra footage clips of using the glue gun and cut it into the correct place. With them added it made another problem, the music wasn’t long enough so I had to track back through the audio and cut segments mixing the audio tracks together. It was difficult to sync at first but I feel like I got there in the end. After this was solved I was ready to export and upload my assignment to the university canvas website.
The assignment was handed in a day before the due date (5th May). Overall I enjoyed doing this project, I was really happy with how the alien turned out in the end, it achieved all of the expectations that I was trying to aim for. I was able to bring most of the skills together from the other previous assignments. For example, I used some of the camera angle skills and text overlays from my “Art is a workout” video as inspiration. This is shown throughout the How-to film with the variety of shots and angle work around the creation of the monster with the words on the screen helping navigate the story in the video. There were also elements that I took from the’ A day in the life of a cat’ assignment with the audio use of audio mixing and levelling, specifically when adding sounds onto the video and decreasing the levels so it allows the background sound to appear for more depth. To improve next time I feel like I would have to make sure I have the right equipment for the job because in all of these short films I had to overcome the same obstacles of how and where the camera was going to be positioned since I didn’t have a tripod, the way I tackled this project was by using my surroundings in the garage, kind of similar to my ‘Art is’ video but with many more angles. I had to get really creative with this in order to make things work so I used items like towels and paint buckets to keep the camera upright with focus.
———————————————————
Inspiration video links \/
My ‘A day in the life of a cat’:
A Day in the Life of a Cat – YouTube
My ‘Art is a Workout’ video:
Will McDaniel Channel :
Will McDaniel (More Specifically the Creature I took Inspiration off ) :