BRAINIACS
Brainiacs - Integrated Project
This projects serves as the culmination of skills I was taught at Johnson University, being the capstone course for my major. Unlike the majority of integrated projects for this course, this is not a standalone effort. This was made, not including the wonderful cast, by myself and two other students in Johnson University’s media department, Michael Powell and Caleb Phillips.
This project is split into various parts, each person taking on various aspects of the project. The video itself is split into various acts separated by commercial breaks. There are four acts in total, with myself taking the reins on the opening and closing acts, while Michael Powell was the director and editor for the second and third acts. Caleb Phillips was the primary audio guy throughout the entire film, in charge of recording AND EQing every line, in addition to SFX both pulled and foley, as well as composer of the main theme of the movie as heard in the opening act.
For my part, I was in charge of the beginning and ending acts. This includes; Scriptwriting, the animation of the opening sequence, all videography, all video editing, and I was also in charge of the majority of the graphics seen throughout the film, as well as most of the graphics associated with the project, including a poster and a Blu-Ray cover. The music/song choices implemented in those acts are the only parts that I had no hand in creating and implementing.
The commercial breaks were also split amongst everybody, with myself having full creative control of the first commercial, Michael the second, and Caleb the third. Each of us were in charge of every aspect of those commercials.
INSPIRATIONS - Night of the Living Dead and Cloverfield
The film is introduced with a zombie film directly inspired by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. For this I recreated the feel and look of old movies by converting it to black and white, then adding various masks and effects in Adobe Premier Pro in order to get realistic film grain and lines, as well as the faded strobe light effect. While Night of the Living Dead doesn’t look quite as dated as the film effects applied to the video, I thought it more important to recreate the feel, rather than the reality, of old films.
Act two, by Michael Powell, begins with a segment filmed like a found-footage film, such as Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield. This segment was recorded entirely on his phone in our university’s basement. The plot of an unknown threat was also a source of inspiration for the plot line present in the film, alongside the zombie-esque creatures in Night of the Living Dead.
Challenges
The filming of Brainiacs was not simple, nor easy. Many planned excursions had to be scrapped. For example, we were originally going to be shooting an entire sequence within a parking garage in Knoxville, however, the city has laws that prevented us from doing so with their zero-tolerance policy, so that was changed to be in a warehouse district, shot in the back corner of our university, and even that had its share of difficulty. It’s actually ironic how much of the film was shot on campus-grounds, as it is the destination of the protagonists of the film.
Schedule conflicts also arose, as well as issues with the weather. The biggest issue was filming the cult scene in the woods. That took four hours to film, in the rain, and in the dark, while working around many people’s schedules. The lighting was an issue, as the battery packs kept dying, and we had no way to charge them out in the woods. Working around the Blackmagic camera’s battery posed a similar problem throughout the entire filming process, and causes some footage to become corrupted and unusable, leading to big changes in editing, specifically in the first act, that we could not go back and film again.
The microphones we used also came with their fair share of issues, but you’d have to ask Caleb more information about that.
Graphic Media
For this project, I was the person in charge of any and all graphics in and associated with the project. This includes a movie poster, and the product design for a fictional company within the films universe, Duiniapharm, a rather shady medical corporation whose products may or may not be the reason behind the events of the film. I designed product labels for their medications, with Corflax originally being intended to be a box rather than a medicinal capsule, but that was changed. I chose the red and purple color scheme because I wanted to convey the sense of danger this nefarious company causes to arise while still looking professional. This analogous color scheme was rather hard to balance, but I believe that I did it successfully. Unfortunately, due to WordPress’s limitations, I have to upload the work as a PDF rather than a gallery, as the poster seemed to be too big for the site to process.
Beginning with the poster, I was inspired by the iconic poster for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, although I’d certainly say our project is a lot less um…. salacious than that movie, and of course I had to change the general tone of the poster to be a bit more dreadful and not, y’know, suggestive.
Following that is the news logo, a briefly seen logo in the bottom left corner of the news broadcast segment. It may be rather hard to notice in the film, but I rather like it. It’s based off of the old ABC 5 news logo, and includes two separate designs, a blue and a red one. In the end we went with the red one as it better contrasted with the background of the shot. As a standalone logo however, I prefer the blue one.
Trailer
Finally, each of us made a unique trailer for the project. Mine focused more on creating a tense atmosphere. Honestly, it’s more tense than the actual film.