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.