A Day in the Life of Imageworks.
A Very Imageworks Day
Production
I made this short film for the second Annual Imageworks Awards as this year the company introduced a new category: “Oustanding Short Film”. All the employees could participate creating short films with the theme: “A Day in the Life of Imageworks”. The short films shouldn’t exceed a time limit of 1 minute and any creative medium was acceptable.
With all these premises, I started to work and think about an idea. It is funny how the first idea was really different and how it evolved to what it finished being.
The pillar idea always was not to show any face in the movie, just closups, avoiding the need of using a lot of people or having really good acting skills.
In the shooting we were just three people, the voice over would be made afterwards once the editing was closed and the pacing good enough. Everyone of us had to play a character. We shot it in a Saturday morning, to avoid people around. The filming was really funny and smooth as we did a huge number of setups really fast.
Editing
The most challenging part of this short film, was the editing. As the short must be under one minute, I had to cut a lot of good material (jokes) and ideas. I had to rearrange some parts and even rewrite some lines. To give the shortfilm a better understanding and pacing I used tricks such as reverse shots to create new ones, speed some others, create screen closeups…
Here I show some examples of this editing work:
As it was forbidden to shot any screen at work, I had to create all the screens closeups. For this shot, I made a Gmail style ‘Calendar notification’ and on top I applied: a monitor texture with dust and a pixel effect.
I did the same here, I created a hangout chat style and to give the computer monitor appearance I applied on top a screen pixel.
This shot was composed by two different ones. As at the time of editing the shortfilm, I realized that when the door was opening, the protagonist should get up quickly as he was in a hurry. In the original shot that didn’t happen, and he remained there sitting down. To solve that, I used the shot where he was sitting, I reversed the shot to look like he was getting up and I replaced him. Also I added the notification bubble to avoid creating an insert, and making the editing smoother.
For the messages, when I shot it I knew I would add the messages on it, so I left space in the right side of the image to add them. I tracked the phone so the messages move with the phone.
I did a cleanup pass on this shot, as there is a hair strand and some dust on the desk that looked really ugly.
And some color correction examples (First image is the final frame, and the second the original one):
This is the only shot filmed with a goPro at 4K (the others were filmed at 1080p with a Canon). The color correction and the 35mm noise (added to all the shots in the shortfilm) helped to blend this shot with the others.
Thanks for watching! I hope you enjoyed the short film as much as we enjoyed making it!