Filming day

Great Job!

Work in progress: Practical stuff

We've reached that point where we now have to do lots of physical work to produce a recording.

This included a green screen shoot:

What's the deal with tech guys always saying how difficult chroma key is? This setup of a £10 green sofa throw from Ikea and 3 random desk lamps produced a perfect cutout!

And below are a couple of photos of us testing our screen setup in the basement of our building! (Please excuse Dexter...)

Long file is long

There must be something wrong with me, making a decision to work with such a ridiculously large file when I know there are simpler, quicker solutions. But frankly, they can't be as fun and effective as this!

The aim is to represent a film reel coming to an end, as part of some sort of technical malfunction. I was interested in creating that familiar effect where the speed of the film changes and makes the image appear to move up or down. I could have just animated the whole screen to physically move up and down to suggest this, but I think this would have looked too fake.

So, instead, I decided to actually make a digital piece of film reel, consisting of 25 frames. This one image is 25 times the length of 1080p. (Not the one I uploaded here, this is about 10% of the full image!)

Then, I bought this into After Effects and made it moooove real fast, downwards. I perfected the keyframes to make the car move up and down nicely.

A good few hour's work for what will be ONE SECOND of the film.

Isn't it great being an animator.......? :D

Tripods.

Okay, so I spent about 2 hours yesterday researching tripods.

It was SO EXCITING!!!

I originally wanted to find out if there is a tripod head which can securely hold a projector. If it's anything less than completely secure, Livvy's dad might worry about the safety of his projector...
Well, no one really makes projector-specific ones, but there are a few which are designed for laptops, and VCRs(?), apparently. This would be ideal for quick setups and touring where no ceiling mount is available.

Then I uncovered what seems like a secret cult of photographers who love their laptops so much that they can't resist having both a laptop and a camera on one tripod. Most of these systems are some kind of horizontal bar which fits to the tripod head...

The combined weight of a bar like this, the projector and my SLR would be about 6KG. This is actually quite a lot, which I never realised back in German lessons in year 8 when in my ignorance I ordered 20KG of apples in an oral exam.
So it goes without saying that a good tripod would be needed to support a system like this.

Researching my own tripod that I have used since the days of animating plasticine blobs - the one you can see in some of our production images - I have uncovered that not only is it a study tripod capable of supporting such weight, but also that it is over 30 years old! Wow. Apparently, that's a good thing. There's hardly any parts that aren't made of solid gunmetal.

Maybe I should add some tripod accessories to my Christmas list!  

Live-action hands and font test

In our quest for interesting illusions and nice little visuals for our Joiner scenes, we found inspiration in this video for the song Neon Bible by The Arcade Fire. It's obviously not some kind of live performance, but it may be possible for us to achieve something similar if we use a black enough screen...

So, for our latest test we recorded our hands in a green screen setup, and we are quite pleased with the results. The keying worked perfectly, so at least we know we can use a setup as simple as this for our actual production, providing it's only hands that need to be captured:

Luckily I've got enough green paper to cover a whole wall if needed, so plenty of chance to try a bigger setup next time!

After filming our hands, they were used to create an After Effects composition against a completely black background. This image was added to the composition and also put at the beginning of the exported video for size and position reference, as stupid as it looks:

At the same time we wanted to start testing pieces of typographic animation to be sync'd to things that we say. We dug out the lightbox and did a bit of traditional animation to create a speech bubble and the word 'JACK.' These were then captured and Fo' shopped into some tidy little animations which were then added to the After Effects Composition. 

Here's a video showing a couple of the green screen hand recordings, and then a few of the tests on the screen. Notice the reference photo at the beginning of each test, and my terrible timing at saying my name in time with the typography. Also, I disabled the audio track on the green screen recording, because at the time I was listening to Meat Loaf.  

Aside from the tests, we are currently working on the animatic for our project. Expect to see some animatic clips soon!

Our new botched test screen

As we are still in the land of doing tests, we have set up a temporary solution to not having a real venue yet! We have settled for my bedroom as the best place, eek. Looks like I'll have to get used to sleeping in a cinema!
After buying a king size white sheet from Argos, plenty of bargain black sheet things from Primark, two tension rods and a roll of super-strength Duck tape from Wilko's - we have got a functioning screen...

It could definately be improved for a few more quids, but it's good enough for us now. New HD video tests to follow soon...

Technical: Planned projection setup

Some of these details - such as seating and throw distance-  can't really be worked out yet until we know more about our venue. We are also still unsure about the idea of projecting onto the floor, but you can see there is about half a metre of floor projection on this image.

Projector Time!

So, in a nutshell, we are pursuing an idea which involves live actors performing with projected animation. The action will be highly synchronised, allowing the actors to interact with the animated image. The screen will cover a whole wall surface, but will be used selectively to create composition and lighting effects.

An essential part of this project will be the projector, no doubt about it. We've been doing loads of research and tests regarding projector units, screens, brightness, contrast and resolution amongst other things, it turns out projectors are actually very complicated. That is, of course, if you want the result to look better than a standard office presentation...

Fortunately, Livvy's Dad owns two projectors, one of which is installed here and has been available for our tests all summer. The other will hopefully be with us in Bristol within the next couple of months. The projector we have been using (the Panasonic PT-AE1000E) is very effective, as it is full HD, has a brightness of 1100 Lumens, a high contrast ratio and very quiet fans.

Now would be a good time to say that we plan to use full HD for this project. Utilising a HD projector, a HD DSLR, a PS3 and Blu-Ray media, we're not looking back!

Saying that, our tests are not in HD yet, as we don't currently have access to a Blu-Ray burner. Nevertheless, some of our tests will be on here soon...