Lighting test - candle

I picked a flame effect from  Motion and imported it in After Effects. I rendered a scene of my attic which had the light setting of a small candle at night.

Although we havent made a 3d candle yet, this was a test to see how it would look it the movie. After rendering the test movie, I realised that since the source of light is flame, the light will probably be flickering a bit. I played around with different setting with the Hue/Saturatation and Brightness/Contrast effect. I changed the value back and forth at different times and then repeated the layers over 10 seconds.

I got a pretty good effect out of it..but it can still look better. I am not very good at lighting 3D sets, since I only learned about the very basics of lighting in Foundations. But I got some help from Nils who told me a bit about what different types of light do. This helped me decided what kind of light I would use for specific effects. (for e.g. used a volume light for the candle light and a spot light with a blue/white tint to represent moonlight hitting part of the left wall)

the moonlight effect is very subtle and barely  noticeable, which is the effect I wanted. In this shot, the moonlight is hitting the attic window at an angle and can only be seen on part of the wall.

"Pouf" effect

I decided to do a bit more research on how i could do the "pouf" effect for the ghost.  I fired up Motion and started noting down every different effect which might be useful for our movie. From the short list I made, I picked out some smoke and magic dust effects which I might use.

Initially I went on youtube to try and find an easy way to create dust particles for the attic, but instead I found a good tutorial on "teleporter" effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j89IGDkKkVQ

It  made use of things like Luma Matte, Fractal Noise etc..terms which I had never heard of before today. Basically it made the object disappear gradually and then it made use of an imported particle effect to make it look nice.

I tried this out on a quickly keyed out shot of the ghost using magic dusts (de-saturated) as effect.

Well, this didnt look very good. I wanted a more spontaneous effect..like a 'bang' and then disappear. I found the Surprise Shimmer effect in Motion. I imported it , de-saturated the colours and made it look brighter. I also used two instances of those..one on the upper body, and one on the lower part. (to cover up the whole object)

I thought this looked slightly better..but now I didnt like the way the ghost disappeared. I decided to go back to using the simple Fading out method I had found earlier. (refer to diary)

I deleted the luma matte and just simple applied a fast blur (0 to 200) in less than 1second.

Muuuuch better :)

Eyes for thy skull...

BIG BIG PROBLEM!

We always thought that Tom or Mark would know of an easy way to stick the 3d eyes into the skull. Although we did some research by ourselves, we decided it would be much easier to ask our supervisors how to do it. Turns out, there is no 'easy way' to do this. Well that was a big (and unpleasant) surprise :)

Tom helped us out by suggesting ways we could do this and we are still working on this...it sounded simple enough...but nothing is ever as simple as it sounds...sigh.

Particle effects...

I have found an interesting and much easier way of making the ghost "evaporate" in After Effects. There are more details about this in the diary. But basically we are going to play around with what I found to create this effect for this semester.

For the next semester we will be using proper particle effects, since Lauren has not properly mastered it yet. She told me she would be able to do this properly next semester.
One of our friends has told us about some plug-in for after effects which creates particle effects. I will try to download this if it is free soon.

End of semester panic...

Well the semester is drawing to its end...and like everyone else, i can feel the panic..big time!

During the keying out process, I realised that all the light we used during the shooting was not exactly a good thing. i've had glares, different tones of brightness, shadows etc in some shots. But some of the them were really easy to key out because of the lighting. So I guess for next time we have to use different light settings for different shots.

Although the ghost effect test I did earlier this semester was really good, the ghost effect for the movie is not looking so good. Maybe its because I've been looking at it too much or something..but I feel like most of the stuff keyed out isn't as good as I thought it would be after we had done the tests. The shots are going to require more work than I thought.

The set is moving along fine. Most of the time has been spent on finding proper textures.
The placeholder texture I was using looked good, but was not worn out enough. Even after some editing in photoshop, it still didn't quite have the effect I wanted. I must have tried like 8-9 different wood textures..but in vain.
While walking to Safeway, I found an interesting old wood texture in the village (berwick). I had my phone with me so I took a few pictures of it. Although it needed quite a bit of editing,
this one did the trick.

The desk is done and looking good. After importing it into the attic, I realised that it didnt look worn out enough. Some more editing will be needed for this texture.

I have already tested some different lighting setups, but I still need to decided on a proper one. I realised that the lights actually made A LOT of difference. It made the set look gloomy and old..which is what we needed.

My knowledge of 3D is limited to basic modeling and texturing, so I had no idea how to move the camera around the set and export it as a movie. Lauren had just learned that in the animation class and helped me out. I haven't tried it yet, but it looked fairly simple.

My confidence about the whole studio project is going down down down! I feel like our semester 1 submission is just going to end up looking like a BIG testing phase. We have learned A LOT during this semester, and already know how to fix the mistakes we made, but because of time constraints instead of fixing up the errors, we have tried to work around some of them and presenting a modified version for semester 1.

I am positive that by the end of this year, this project is going to look much better. We have already planned on re-shooting some scenes again next semester, and already know how to do it better this time.

Sound Recording...

The week following the filming, we booked the sound recording room.
We had only used the sound recording room once before, and the equipment was slightly different then. We were completely lost as to how to make things work in that room!

We spent a good 45min playing around with all the knobs and buttons and changing every little setting on the mac! We were so clueless was to what we were doing that we even pressed the distress button without knowing what it was for. (we only knew 10min later when a security guard came in..oops!)

After we got things to work, we recorded a few words from Lauren and Steve. I have a sound effects CD, which we will use to make up for sounds we could not record this semester. We will be recording some better sounds for next semester.

Shooting in the green screen room...3

We booked the green screen room again the following week for the final shooting session of semester 1.

From the last session we realised that we were going to need more lights and...more time! We ended up booking the room for the afternoon so that we could stay after hours and finish everything. Since we had to keep all the equipment with us until the next day, we decided we would just drop everything back to my place (10 mins walk away)

For this session, we had 6 sets of lights/gels!! Plus the set that Mark left for us on the previous week. Again it took us about an hour to set everything up. Lauren had brought a green blanket along that we were going to use to move the skull around. Steph and Jamie were in the green screen room the same morning and they left us their green boxes to use. (yayy!)

The place looked like some big movie set after we were done unpacking eveything! So many lights..haha :)

After playing around with some different settings, we managed to get a bright 'ring' of light on the floor. This was going to make the whole chroma keying process a lot easier for me, as I figured I would not have to use a different setting on the leg. With so many lights, we also hoped we would get a really good outline around the subject.

After a few scenes (the first few scenes had no dialogues) we realised that there was actually no sound at all being recorded. We played around with the mic and the camera connection for a while, but nothing worked. So we got a different microphone, but it wasnt working either. By that time it was already 18h and the office was closed. We decided we would have to change some of the scenes for this semester's submission. We would record the dialogues seperately and then use them in scenes where you could not actually see the speaker's face. Since we had already planned on having a few shots like this, it was no big deal. We will be shooting those scenes again, with proper sound next semester.

We had some trouble with scenes where we had the skull because we had to use the boxes and the green blanket. The blanket was thrown on Steve and he had to hold the skull. There was a lot of shadows on the blanket itself but also on the box. I tried my best to get rid of them, but there was still some which I could not do anything about.

We also could not hide the hand holding the skull as the blanket was not big enough. (at home I realised there was a possible solution to this, but it was too late) .


All in all, everything went well, except for the sound. We managed to shoot most of the scenes we needed. Exceptions to this would be:-
- the scenes with the notice paper (we did not have time to prepare the papers)
- scenes where the actors can be seen talking

A few hours after we got back home, I got a message from Lauren saying we cannot use the last part of the footage. I went back to check..and as it turns out, Steve forgot to take off his glasses while recording this scene...argh! (another shot that we would have to omit for the first semester and shoot again next semester).

Shooting in the green screen room...2

A late update on the stuff that went on in the green screen room a few weeks ago...

The second time we tried shooting in the green screen room, we had an alternate storyboard prepared. Lauren was the loan shark and Steve, her husband, was the ghost. We brought in an extra set of lights as we had some trouble with lighting the legs the first time.

We had only booked the room for the morning and we spent over an hour just setting up the lights, camera, mic..basically getting ready. We had to try different light settings to get it right. We used pink gels this time as they were less intense.

After all this was done, we only had less than an hour left for proper shooting. I was at the camera and was directing Steve together with Lauren. I had some trouble getting used to zooming in and out at a steady pace and Steve had to do the same scenes a few times until we both got it right. (Steve with the acting, and myself with the camera)
Mark Power even came in to have a look and help us out. He gave us his skull and another set of lights, which turned out to be very useful. We never got to use the Fluro light after all though, but the setting was much better this time.

By the end of the session we only got about 1-2 min of footage. We actually never got around to using that footage AT ALL, because after some initial testing we realised it was no good.

We did learn a lot from that session tho. We realised we needed more lights on the floor, since there was a BIG difference in how well the background and the floor was lit. I got a bit more comfortable using the camera and we could not set up everything a lot quicker for the next session.

During studio class later the same day, Mark showed me how to crop, resize and use a mask on a movie. He showed me how to use two different layers of the same movie, so that different settings can be applied to different parts of it. That was useful to solve the problem of badly lit legs.

The Return...

Haven't had time to update my blog for two weeks now. Things have been cRrrazy! But everything is under control, thank god!

So here's what's new since the last post:

- yes I did remember how do to bump mapping! But it didn't seem to work as well as I thought it would. More details in the diary.

- Mark told me a bit about Motion, a program which I think will be very useful for our special effects. He gave me some tips on how to make one effect look like something else. I still havent had time to play around with Motion yet, but it will be done soon. This took a load off my shoulders, as I was finding it hard to learn about particle effects.

- found more wood textures which I could use for different parts/furniture in the attic.

- With the help of Nils, I remembered how to play around with textures using gradient. I'm still very slow at it since I'm not much of a photoshop person. I tried editing the floor texture I was using in the attic, but it looked weird. Turns out that this texture was already edited to be used as tile, so that's good.

- Shooting and sound recording for this semester has been completed over the last two weeks. Editing still needs to be done. More about the shooting and sound recording in another post.


We have now entered the post-production phase. I will be finishing the attic, chroma keying the footage and editing the sound over the next few days. Lauren has informed me today that she learned about particle effects in her unit, so she might be able to help me out with this, or take over this task.

I'm thinking we are doing O.K on the time for now, as long as we don't suddenly feel like taking a long break :) Things are looking good and I'm keeping my fingers crossed :)