Cocaine Cowboys - Pre-production

Research, Designs and References

Here is a collection of bits and bobs of research, designs and references that I have produced, collected and used.


This here is the link to the 7 minute documentary clip via YouTube. This is where we acquired the audio, which will be used in the conclusion of the film.

Miami in the 80's - Dadeland Shooting - Cocaine Cowboys

As a group, we decided to work on a certain part of the animatic, I was given the beginning to work on, so I started researching and designing concepts of what would be sufficient to the story and what would best set the scene. I always thought an establishing shot would be a good way to introduce the scene and as the story is set in Miami, I looked up images of overviews of part of Miami, which can be viewed below. 

Sketch of the establishing shot overlooking Dadeland Mall, Miami.

An image from the documentary, showing the same establishing shot.

An overview image of a part of Miami.
Will be using this as reference to set the scene at the beginning of the animatic.

An image of the construction of a mock up of the city of Miami in progress using Google Sketch. One of the requirements of this assessment was to use the program Google sketch in some form so I decided to produce an establishing shot for the beginning of the animatic.

This clip above is some live action reference for a shot in the animatic where the culprits walk up to the store. This is also a good reference for a perspective shot, when the character walks at a certain angle and gets smaller as he moves away and bigger as he moves closer.

Another perspective shot, this time from the waist down. So we can only see the legs. Not seeing adults from the waist down creates a kind of uneasy and suspicious feeling. This idea was inspired by many examples including Mammy Two Shoes from the original "Tom & Jerry" shorts and the opening scene in "E.T. The Extra Terrestrial." where the adults are only seen from the waist down until near the ending of the film.

I think I've spent enough uploading movie files onto this blog, which takes so long to do so I've decided to take some images of other reference footage that I have produced. The image above is just an image of me goofing around, acting out a shot for the animatic in which the culprit shoots a gun around the car park.

Reference for when the store door opens. Used the back door in the kitchen for this shot.

An image taken from the movie, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial where Peter Coyote's character is overviewing the area. Notice how we only see him from the waist down, thus leaving his identity unknown. I decided to use the same idea for the animatic because I believed it would arouse more suspense and make the opening scene more dramatic.

Audio

The link below is for a website where I was able to acquire many of the sound effects that were used in the animatic. As well as recording other authentic sounds by using various objects and my dictaphone, I recorded these sounds directly from the computer via stereo mix by using Adobe Soundbooth. Then I simply manipulated them by altering pitch, duration, amplitude, which ever we needed to make the audio sound better. When I saved all the sound effects in WAV format, I simply imported them into Premiere Pro and started arranging the sounds in the desired order.

http://www.stockmusic.com/sound_effects

Just an image of the 7 minutes worth of audio taken from the documentary footage and converted into a WAV file in Soundbooth.