Chess Battle, video production
"...It's about a bold move to measure one's capability with a game of Chess..."
Chess Battle is a 3-minute video production for my Video Production II at the University of Utah. The video was a part of Debonair Debut on KUEN, Channel 9. Wednesday 16th at 9:00 p.m., and Tuesday 22nd at 1:00 am, December 09.
Project Time Frame
Two months to prepare the scripts and storyboards, do site inspection, find talents and set up rehearsals with the crew members.
Two days to shoot the footage (3 hours each day). That's all we could fit in the shooting week, considering we all had classes and work to do.
Almost two weeks to edit, even though most editions were done within 2 days, the rest were just for minor tweaks and improvements of the credit. and how to properly export the video to be in the same format as everyone else in the Command Z productions.
Storyboard
They were all hand-drawn, by me. Almost 60 pictures in total. Scanned only a few.
Credits
Producer / Director / Editor : Assani Duongsaa (me)
Videographer : Danny Brown
Production Assistant : Ryan Paul
Talents : Breden Whitney and Carolyn Tuzel
Supervisors : Robert K. Avery (professor) and Lee Zurligen (technician)
The Paper
Pre-Production Process
Generating the Idea – Visualizing images or videos from music has been something I often do in my free time. I believe in emotions and feelings that are embedded into the songs, and the process and the result of that are equally interesting. When I started thinking about this production, I looked for songs that I like and are under 3 minute length. Playing with the Big Boys is one of the first songs I thought about. I liked the song and furthermore I understood the song. Once I had picked the song to work on, then finding the theme is the next step. I didn’t try to look for an alternate song either, since I knew second guessing wouldn’t bring me any good; I knew the song would work just fine.
Initial Purpose of the Program – The project’s theme was defined from the song I picked, since the very beginning. Listening to the song, you would get the idea or the concept of 2 sides challenging each another for supremacy, and I related that to Chess. I myself am not good at playing Chess, and it’s not my favorite hobby either, but I am interested in war subjects. War movies, war stories, war games, war documentaries, I like them all. One very common and important aspect of both chess and war is the fact that they involve strategies and tactics. So I decided the theme of the production to be about chess, but then I needed to make it more interesting than just a game of chess. I wanted to show the feelings and emotions as well. Then I started putting in the concept of inner thoughts, the ‘as if…’ part. It would be too boring to make a video of 2 persons just playing chess, especially since this was not about chess but about challenging the opposing side, but it could be more interesting to make a video of 2 persons playing chess as if the game meant something much more than that. I wanted the video to show the fight between the players, the drive that pushed one to challenge the other, and the feeling that they had to win. I wanted to show all that to the audiences; a game of simple chess, a fight between the two persons, and the inner thoughts or inner feelings that would drive them to win as if they were the leaders of two opposing armies, and losing would be like surrendering the war.
I also had an inspiration from a Music Video of Blitzkrieg, from Deathstars rock and metal band, which features a game of chess between two crazy persons and shows aerial combat of fighter planes as the chess game progresses.
The song, also, had its own mood that would determine the visual content. The song started up slowly, building the tension between the two sides. Then it would pick up the speed and the volume. I visualized it as the two players would challenge one another, before starting the fight. At the song’s peak, that would be the scenes where one player would corner the opposing side by outsmarting and would force the losing side for a surrender or a checkmate. Shortly after the peak when the song slowed down and faded away there would be the realization of defeat and surrendering of one player, before the fighting faded away and they would be back to a normal game of chess.
To further match the content to the audio, I decided the transitions between scenes during the ‘build up’ to be fading in and out, with black background. When things would be ‘heated up’, then the transitions for the scenes would be quick clean cut. Camera work also had to be active, because it would be too boring if the video were to lack movement. For that, I needed a lot of zooming, panning, getting in and out of focus for the right shots and so on. This meant that my storyboard had to be very detailed for my production crews to get things right, and for the actors to perform right.
Toward the end of the video where the song was at its peak and so was the progress of the game, the losing player would realize that ‘defeat is near’; the camera would zoom in and out of his face and his eye ball, losing and getting the focus right. All this for a one or two-second shot to show how insane the game would be, and that he would be ‘losing it’.
I then decided that the camera needed some continuity and not be moving around all over the places and shooting the scenes from totally opposite sides. So I cut out the part where the camera would orbit around the players out and always keep the Black side on the left and the White side on the right throughout the whole thing.
I also had to plan which part of the song to be lip-synced, or which part to be focused on the players’ emotion or on the chessboard to show the game’s progress. I decided to match the lip-sync scenes to enhance the mood, the example would be the chorus ‘You’re playing with the big boys now’ part, where most of the times it’s the White player who always lip-syncs it. While some lyric phrases that don’t fit well with the video are just music instead of lip-sync.Refining the Idea– I wanted to show the battlefield or the fight between 2 armies, by using 3D Modeling since it is also something I can do. I play many kinds and genres of games; science fiction, fantasy, historical, modern themes and so on, though my favorite is the science fiction. I also do some 3D modeling of spaceships and such. So I thought it would be cool if I were to portray the battlefield in the form of spaceship warfare for the ‘fight’ part of the video.
But I then realized I would be cutting it too risky. I had never produced a video production before; starting off with something involving a great amount of camera movements and all was already a bold move as it was. Additionally, my 3D Modeling skill is not yet at production level. So I had to cut out that ‘Battlefield concept’ out, scenes which would have been about one third of the total video length, alongside the scenes of the ‘Simple Game of Chess’, and the scenes of the ‘Fight between the Two’.
I also believed in the equality of the two genders, so I thought it would be cool, and fair, to have one side as a woman, who would challenge the man to the chess game, and would ultimately win.
Once I had the storyboard and the concepts nailed down, then I started looking for the talents for acting. Instead of asking my friends to help, I went to the length of contacting the Acting for Film office in the Arts department and asked for the list of actors they had, that’s because the talents I needed had to be quite experienced with the shooting and everything. Their appearances also had to match my visions and my description I had. That and because I am quite new at video production so it sounded a good idea to have someone who is not new at the process. Finally I had selected two talents for the job. I scheduled a brief meet-up and we gathered to go over the ideas in details and all, then they practiced a mock-up of the chess game with my concept ideas and I took some pictures for references. Later I used those pictures to make a promotion screen in Photoshop as a visual aid for my production presentation.Selecting Production Approach – By using the song as the main driving factor, the visual must match the song. Syncing up the visual and the audio content became a very important factor for the production’s success, much more important than staying true to the chess’s move sequences or progression of the game itself.
Solving Pre-Production Problem – There were a few issues with the actors’ time, and the location and lighting. At first I wanted to use the studio in the Communication department, for I saw the importance of getting good quality and correction of lighting, as it would help setting up the mood for the audiences, and the scenes I wanted must be pretty dark and grim when I wanted. But the studio would be opened only on the weekdays, when the actors and the production crews were not available. In the end I had to look for an alternative location, and decided to pick a conference room in the Union building where there’s no windows instead. So in the end I still managed to control the light for the shooting. However, using the light-kits wouldn’t be as good as using the studio’s lighting as they were not so directional enough, and moving them around could pose technical problems during the shooting for the production assistance and the videographer as well.
After the conference room was selected, the crew members and I tried setting the place to match my scene description. We picked a corner to be the site, and borrowed some curtain to block the room’s whiteboard. There was no sofa available around, so we used silk tablecloths to cover the chairs instead. We got a chair covered in black, another in white, and the table, where the chessboard will be set, covered in red. The result was nice and fitting.
Even though the shooting site-room had no windows, there were small glass-window as part of the two doors, but black cardboards patched them up nicely.
Shooting the Program
Crew Assignments and Participation – I already had my videographer and assistance assigned. And besides, my storyboard was detailed enough so everyone knew what to do. People showed up on time and everything went by the schedule, mostly. There was no major problem here.
The Shooting Schedule – Saturday, and Sunday were the only two days we could actually do the shooting. At first, however, we had planned to work on the Monday as well, but somehow everyone ended up busy on the day, so additional shooting day was cancelled, and I was left with no extra shots as I had hoped. Though I did get sufficient shots to complete the video. I also recorded my fingers setting up the chess pieces for the beginning of the video, the scene which was considered an alternative opening.
Preparing the Segments for the Editing – Nothing more than naming each shots to match which tape they were recorded. When I finished capturing the footage, I ended up with 101, 102, 103… 201, 202, 203, 204, 205… and 301, 302, 303, 304… clips since I used a total of 3 video tapes for recording the whole shooting. There were 99 clips, ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes each. There were 52 clips from the first tape which also were from the first shooting day. There were 13 clips and 34 clips from the second and the third accordingly.
Required In-Studio Production
The Editing Experience– There was no problem with this issue. I am used to and am quite experienced in video editing process.
Solving Post-Production Problems – We had made sure the lighting was correct throughout the shooting process and I didn’t have to make any adjustment to the shots. However, there were some issues when I exported the movie file. The HDV type of Quicktime file format would not work on any PC. So I had to export a different file format that would work on PC for me to work with while I revised the Script, which was the H.264 type, but even so, the video quality when viewed on PC was still lower than when viewed on a Mac. So when I turned in the project, initially I turned in the H.264 version for better compatibility, but since we would view the production on a Mac anyway I re-submitted in HDV instead, to make things flow smoothly when we combined all production into one television program.
Self-Evaluation of the Final Project
Now that the production and the editing process is completed, I’m quite contented with the result. However, I could still see rooms for improvements if, only if, I had the resources to. The resources of which I actually did not have and I would not have in any time soon, available studio and available crew members and talents. I wanted to show clear different scenes of a Light room and a Dark room, indicating when it’s about a fight, and when it’s about a game of chess. However, with the light-kit and the amount of light I got during the shoot, the result was a grey-black room instead of pitch black room so it took us longer than we wanted to move the lights around each time we moved the camera during the shooting. The light also wasn’t directional enough, so it illuminated some of the unwanted background as well. Actors and crew members was another issue. It was quite hard to find the time we all could meet and spend a few hours to get the work going.
