Assignment 4 - Survival Mahjong

Cheryl and I had a great time working on this project together. We in fact combined our ideas for this assignment. My initial idea was to create fighting scenes while for Cheryl, she thought of character with split personality and playing mahjong. So we developed our combined plot to flow from the playing of mahjong to end up with us fighting.

The filming process was tedious as we had to think of various angles to shoot the film to make it more action packed. So all the various camera techniques come into use. Our storyboard did quite follow our final product except for the various angles involved, which we did impromptu adjustment based on onset feasibility. For the fighting scenes, we made use of quite a lot of low angles to bring out the dramatic effect.

Before filming, we also planned out various effects to use and a challenge was to visualize the effects involved when filming. For instance, we had the ‘dragonball effect’, the super speed effect and some other effects which were done ‘manually’ and enhanced using premiere/after effects. A differentiating factor in our assignment also lies in the focus on film movement, transitions and cutting scenes. However, these film transitions were not planned beforehand. They were derived impromptu based on our raw footage. We believe that these transitions help to enhance the anxiety and fury theme.

Comments from the class were good. Dr Julian pointed out masking problems which we have to rectify in the first few scenes. In our final product, we also added more fighting scenes and enhanced the colorings to further enhance the mood of the film.