Lighting for Ben

Well, what a week I have had. The editing of my project has been neglected somewhat since I have come on board to Ben?s project Aloha as dop, featuring a love sick Elvis meets the Devil, 'Hellvis' character who inhabits a hellish island, see Ben's blog for full details of the project. The lighting side of this is proving to be a lot more fun than my project since I get to play with shadows and filters rather than just creating a sterile white environment. As with my project I?m still using a basic three point set-up; the main light source coming from stage high right as the spot, a softer red light from the bottom left and a gold reflector above the stage provide the fill. The reflector also provides as a bit of a backlight, along with a light positioned behind the stage which is aimed at the backdrop. I am using Deido's to provide most of the light as they can cover a reasonably large area, the LED lights are occasionally bought out to light bits of foliage in the foreground or in some shots light Hellvis from below with an ere red light. I have also put a blue gel in front of the camera, not conventional practice, granted, but it was the result of a happy accident in which I discovered the gel subdued the greens of the jungle props making it look a bit less artificial, it also helps to make the entire thing look like it is set during the night, which it is.
Ben wanted the entire film to be shot in quite a smell depth of field, so I am using a macro lens on the majority of the shots, I have also used a wider angled lens on some shots to show off more the set but with a large aperture to keep a small depth of field. Ben has pretty much given me free reign over how the shots are composed, which is great, and I am really enjoying arranging the scenery to try and give a real depth to the set. I don?t think we will get all of the animation done by Friday but I am going through the storyboard to find similar shots to try and make the shooting schedule as economical as possible so that hopefully we will have broken the back of it. I am also looking to delegate a lot of the post-production on my project allowing me to hopefully do some animation also, fingers-crossed.
On my project, progress has been a bit slower, I do have a new edit and have a big long list of changes recommended by Derrick which I can hopefully implement by the end of the week. Georg did suggest a completely new edit, which I quite like and have had a go at putting it together but I think it would require such a massive re-shoot to keep continuity that I would essentially have to start again.Jake is making a start on the sound and has also volunteered to help out with the editing which will be really good since I am pants at it. Over the coming weeks I am also going to be scooping up any second years who don't look busy enough and persuading them that what they really want to be doing is painting out lots of little lines in Photoshop.

Well there you have it, more next week sports fans!

Rough edit in more detail

As promised I am back with a more detailed look at the rough edit, look,I have even uploaded the video again so you don't have to flick between posts. How kind am I?

Right, here we go then. First off I think I shall talk about the lighting. My approach, from the beginning has been to try and keep things as simple as possible, mainly because I only had four lights to play with. Throughout, I tried to have one main light source coming from stage right and then use reflectors and bounce light as much as possible to try and achieve a rough three-point set up. At some point I discovered I could get some funky shadows by lighting the statues from the top so I introduced some lighting from above also.

I did have some problems getting even lighting, so there are some dark patches and multiple crazy shadows, which in hindsight could have been solved with a Daido but there you go. The whole thing does look a little dark in places, this is because I was using a wide-open aperture on a lot of shots and had to use dim lighting and ND filters to prevent the shot from becoming over-exposed. This can all be brightened up in post...hopefully.

Now, onto some more detail about the shots. The establishing shots where really easy to do, it was just a case of adjusting the focus slightly between frames, the problem with doing this is that the camera is at a huge risk of being nudged every time you touch it and on some of the shots you can see it moving about a bit.

The three shots where the camera is tracking where achieved by dismantling a rostrum and reassembling it so that the camera could move about on it horizontally. This worked really well but the rostrum wasn't very stable and I had to wait about 30 seconds for it to stop shaking before I could shoot a frame, which made for some very long days. In some cases impatience set in and you can see some camera shake, but not too much.

The scenes where the creatures open there mouths where all shot in reverse, simply because I found it easier to animate their mouths closing than opening, this was a little mind bogging at first but I got used to it after a while.

The 2D elements of the shoot where interesting, although they where fairly straightforward and not too mentally demanding to do, since all the animation had been done, technically it was a quite an undertaking to keep everything lined up. This was done very crudely with 20pence pieces etc. as markers, the early attempts at this where a bit rough but towards the end I was getting pretty good at lining stuff up.

Now that I have entered post production I want to have a look at all the animation and remove frames in some places and add others so that it flows a bit better, since each frame is an individual RAW this shouldn't be too hard.

Rough edit

It's done, that's right all the animation is finally done. It been a pretty manic couple of weeks, hence the complete lack of blogging activity but somehow I have managed to get my project ahead of schedule for the first time in ever.
Now I am moving on to what is, for me, the hardest and least stimulating part of the project which is all the editing, tweaking and other digital black magic. It, doesn't really help that I have very little experience with all of this but hopefully I can find someone to hold my hand and guide me through it.
Anyway, for the time being I have quite literally thrown all of the rough footage together into a rough edit to get a gist of how the final thing will look. I must warn you that it was only done using low quality AVIs which were bought straight out of the stop-motion software so its all been a bit stretched and there is a load of stuff which needs cropping out of frame. And of course it all needs putting through photoshop to be tarted-up and have all the nastys removed.

So, we start of with these establishing shots which I have gone off a bit. Georg suggested scrapping the whole lot and just using one or two for titles; the focus pulls are a bit jarring and the pace of it is completely off from the rest of the film.
I like the shot of the creature breaking through the poster but the continuity between this shot and the one which it is inter-cut with is a bit off as the poster moves about.
I'm not sure about the aerial shot, there is a bit too much going on for anything to register, if the the quality of the picture is good enough I might try a much closer crop of the action to focus the viewers attention on the sleeping character.
Again, there is another problem with the viewer registering what is going on when one of the creatures rocks up to eat. The 'rape' scene before might break up the flow a bit too much and i am not sure if it is clear that the montage of creatures eating is supposed to be separate creatures.
I desperately want to re shoot the scene where we first see the piper because the framing is pants, the animation isn't great either but that could be fixed by repeating a few frames hear and there.
The next section, with the piper producing and playing the flute and the creatures reacting, works quite well. There is enough time for the viewer to register everything in frame since the shot is repeated quite a lot and I would like to think that the timing for the creatures starting to bob about is about right to achieve maximum comic effect.
The walking scene is funny but a bit short, so i might inter cut it with the boob bounce shot to extend it a bit. This might jolt a bit with continuity but if you watch the statues in all the shots they are never in the right place anyway.
Well thats about it, obviously the whole thing is in dire need of some proper editing but on the whole I don't think its too bad; it seems to be generating the laughs in the right places at least. At some point I will go through each shot and talk about how it was animated and the lighting and all that jazz, there you go, something to look forward too.