Week 1

For the very first week, we were assigned our teams and these are the people I have the pleasure of working with over the next 10 weeks. I've had many classes with Deanna and Seonjae before but have never worked with them on a project before so I look forward to working with everyone and creating something great!

The first task this week was creating a pitch for our car commercial. Since Savannah is known for its spooky history, we decided to go with something ghostly for our car idea. We landed on the idea of an antique car on display in Savannah comes to life for one last ghostly joy ride of the modern city. We were very inspired by all the cemeteries and ghost tours in Savannah which prompted our idea of the car disappearing like a ghost at the end of the film.

After creating our initial idea, we began gathering lighting and mood references. We had a discussion about spooky vs. scary and landed on the idea that we wanted our lighting and the effects to be more magical and whimsical over dark and scary. The lighting we're going to recreate is night lighting with lots of secondary light coming from the street lights and the buildings.

We thought it would be fun to do an antique car that would've been driving around Savannah back in the day to emphasize our ghostly, historical mood. The model we chose is the Ford Model T Coupe from 1913. The most interesting part about this car is that the headlamps are kerosene wicks which I think will end up looking super cool in our dark, moody lighting and create a cool effect.

The last thing to do was decide on filming locations. While our footage is going to be of modern Savannah, we still wanted to showcase Savannah's more historical aspects such as the cobblestone streets. We also wanted to make a point of choosing a location with Spanish Moss trees since that is a staple of our city. Instead of just shooting one environment, we decided to do 3 so we could push the narrative that the car is driving around town on a joy ride. We also plan to shoot some B-roll footage of Savannah to enhance our final video.

The next task is film our footage over the upcoming weekend and then Deanna and I will begin camera tracking!

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Here are some professional reference from the Mill. This first images are from "Royal Blood." Since my primary job on this team is lighting, I wanted to focus on finding lighting references that would work well in our scene. These are a little warmer than what's in our current reference but I still think it would fit with our mood and our car.

This is from "Hummer" and has some good reference for the FX team and the kind of effect we're going to be trying to show. While not exact to our big disappearing puff at the end, it shows off how the car is moving through the smoke and how the smoke itself moves.