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...)

Lumen Soup: Tests and Animatics compilation

Here's a massive compilation of (most of) the videos we have produced in the first 5 months of our projection animation theatre project. This includes several different visual tests and also the first rough edit of the two poems we will be performing (The first time you have seen anything of the stories here on the blog!).

We hope you enjoy seeing our imperfections, mistakes and laughs, and hearing our hilariously bad American accent placeholder voices - there'll be many more to come before we nail it!


Remember to click that lovely little HD button to see the whole video in high definition.




Tests include:

Watering can
Rabbit in the headlights
One eighty degree burn
Millers' door
Floating hands
Rebel shadows

Animatics include:

Millers' End
The Catipoce!

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!

Millers' End: Video Test 1

Here's a quick video test demonstrating some basic interactivity in the context of a story we are using. We actually did this artwork and made the source video months ago - it was one of the first things we put through the projector! But this is the first time we have filmed it.

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...

Disco dancing.

Playing around with lighting techniques in concept art, thus disco dancing... with cats.



I went on from this to play around with animation in Photoshop and did a rough test of the cat dancing.. I love colouring and layering in Photoshop but animation gets a little fiddly.. but I guess like anything it takes time to get used to.

His name is Claude.

Concept Art

It has been a little while since we really had things moving on here, but, well, we're going to have to dig down soon, aren't we?
So, back in Bristol and with the complete absence of a projector, we have decided to focus on the story and artistic side of things without having to worry about lumens or calibration.

After checking out the ins and outs of our new residence, we have found some useful places for practice and rehearsal (and, strangely enough, this place has an 'indoor garden' - you really have to see it to believe it...). We found a nice little room near a fire escape that looks like it has been largely undisturbed since the '70s, with a whitewashed wall.

Today we set up the camera in the room, put on our greys and did a few 'concept' scenarios. The idea is that we photograph ourselves in basic scene ideas and then layer on some art in Photoshop mainly using multiply layers to create a similar effect to a projected image. The layer of the original photograph isn't edited at all - we just slap stuff on top of it.

See our legs?

Nice UNITE carpet too.

The point of all this is to try some different styles, colour palettes and scenes, and also continue to think about what would be feasible with a projected image. Of course the scenes we are building in this concept art are exaggerations of the capabilities of a projected image - the image would be thrown slightly by our bodies, the brightness levels would be different and also from a live audiences' perspective it would be considerably harder to create the illusion - plus...these images don't move! Plenty of food for thought... 

Some of Livvy's art to follow shortly...

Non-HD Video: Test 4

In our opinion a successful test, even if we can't see it in the HD we'd like - our only current computer is kinda buckling under the strain of 1GB per 10 sec video...

Anyway, using the 180 degree digital painting, the idea was to simply pan the background whist the actor sort of spins around smoothly and slides across a bit. Now, this is considerably more difficult than it sounds, and we got the first idea of what a huge task it would be to rehearse a complete show made up of shots like this. After many takes and lols, we got a few that we were pleased with, including the one below.



Also this video is a bit strange in that the timeline believes it is 22 minutes long. I assure you it will be a very long time until we post a video that is actually 22 minutes long...

Visual Test 4: 180 Degree Pan from Livvy Brewer on Vimeo.

Things to improve for next time: reshape the actor's light spot, increase size of orange spot, decrease contrast, make back of actor's spot black instead of brown and perhaps add another reference point such as a near-closeup object that moves at a different speed to the background.

Also, we made cookies today, full of M&Ms. Jack even time-lapse filmed them. But, we baked them for too long and they ended up as biscuits. And the time-lapse didn't come out very good because they didn't change at all. We better stick to brownies next time.

Test Visuals 3 & 4

This is a still image from another test, yet a pretty unsuccessful one: The aim of the test was create a visual of the actor behind a chain-link fence. We also used prison-bars, but this test was totally unsuccessful.

If you look at the chain-link the visual effect works out reasonably well, however the whole illusion is ruined by the top bar being distorted. The height of the fence is also a problem. However it is not all wasted effort, we will go back to this at a later date and sort out these problems as we feel this technique has definate potential.

This is a preview of a quick panoramic background drawn up on photoshop, The actual resolution is 5720-1080. (Three widescreen HD pictures side-by-side.) Long background is long. We wanted to create the illusion of a 180 degree camera turn but with a live actor.
The brief given for this background was : A darkish night sky (to play with light source), a point of interest and reference(the barn and trees) and the set dimensions.

This background was then taken into AFX to create the turn and the lighting - The video will be up later!

HD Video: Test Visuals 1&2

Here's a short video of 3 selected tests, including white background watering can from test 1, black background watering can from test 2, and headlights on the wall from test 2. Please ignore our random mumblings...


First Projector Tests from Livvy Brewer on Vimeo.

Test Visuals:2

We have made some changes and also created a new test today. The new test was to create moving headlights against a wall, with a white space for the actor to move within the light spheres. 'Rabbit in the headlights' pretty much sums it up.
We have also filmed the experiments using manual settings on the Canon 7D instead of automatic, as this allows us to control focus and exposure. Here are some images from the tests. These pictures are raw 1080p unedited video frames.

Improvements for next time - Make the white space larger in the headlight test (you can see bricks on my shoulder), and maybe try some lighting and shadows on the extremely vibrant watering can. Other than that, the next tests will be new ones.

Video next...

Test Visuals: 1

For the past couple of days, we have been doing some simple visual tests with the projector, all captured on camera. Here's some frames from the video, soon we'll put a few edited clips on here!

This test was for one actor to lift a watering can and pour water over the other actor. The 'wet' actor would then shake off. Like a dawwg.

The watering can and the pouring water were digitally painted, then given some rough movement in AFX. The head shake water was made with one of the particle systems.

During our testing we have been trying different ways to use colour, brightness and composition. For this test, we created both a black and a white version - there are pros and cons of both, see for yourself. Whilst we both like the white version, we think that being able to create lighting effects and composition with the black background is more ideal. There will be few times in our final project when the lighting is quite as minimal as this, however.

After seeing the results, we have noted the following things to amend for the next test:

Decrease brightness of, enlarge and lower spotlights, also increase blurriness of spotlights, decrease opacity of watering can (it was so bright that the camera received it as orange instead of red when using black background), make watering can animation a bit smoother to help actor move with it.

Next test coming soon...

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...