Evaluation

Evaluation                             

Throughout the major project for this module I feel I have learnt a lot of new skills, I have never composited green screen on after effects before, or built a set, so I feel the skills I have learnt on this module will be very helpful to me in my final year.The initial realisation and idea for the project was all based around the theme of the ‘uncanny’, I was working in a group with Kyle an Sian, initially we decided that we would all go away and do our own research and have a group meeting to discuss ideas. I researched into various authors who had written work under the theme of the uncanny, which immediately gave me the idea to use literature as a theme for our piece, I didn’t really want to overcomplicate the idea too much as I knew we only had two minutes of running time, so we decided to create a mood map of ideas relating to this. We came up with a few special effects that we wanted to use within the piece, one of them was using shadows to represent Kafka’s metamorphosis, we wanted our actors shadow to start growing legs and wings like an insect, and it would appear on the wall, we didn’t end up using this effect in the final piece but it’s a good example of the stages that our final piece went through before becoming a finished product.

Our other main idea was one that we ended up following through to the final project that would incorporate a visual effect and a special effect, this wasn’t necessarily linked to our literature idea, but we wanted to have the main character going through a wall, to discover himself on the other side looking back through the hole at himself. The way that we actually did this was to use a piece of installation wall that already had a pre-cut window in it, we bought a separate piece of mount board that was big enough to cover the window, and we nailed it to the back of the installation wall so that it wasn’t visible from the front. The idea with this is that the hole from the front of the installation would be completely covered in wallpaper and it would be unnoticeable that there was anything behind. We then planned to put a separate piece of installation wall that was covered in green fabric, about two metres behind the back of the first wall parallel to it. When the first wall had been broken through the camera would be able to position itself at an angle where you could only see the green screen, allowing us to composite any image we liked, creating a through the keyhole effect.

I feel this method worked well but something that would have made it more effective would have been if we had managed to execute our original idea for the hole, which was to create a tunnel just behind the hole to create the illusion of the wall being thicker and thus being more realistic. Our second part of this special effect came later and was very true to our original theme, we decided we needed a filler between the wallpaper and the hole as when the character tore through it would be very obvious on camera that it was just a piece of wood not the breeze blocks or insulation you might expect. We used non fibre glass insulation spray for around the hole to create something thicker to tear at, then before it was dry we filled the hole full of torn pages from books. So when the character tore at the wallpaper he would have to tear out pages and pages to see through to the other wall. This I feel looked really effective on camera, and was one of our strongest points within the piece. It was supposed to be a metaphor for books transporting you to another world, I feel that possibly this didn’t come across as the piece was only two minutes long but I really enjoyed this initial phase of building the set, I really feel like we pushed ourselves to get this done in time and attempted something quite difficult to do without over-facing ourselves.

Once we had built this initial effect into the set we could start dressing it, we bought an embossed wallpaper as we thought this would lend to the old rustic feel of the set, this set was supposed to be that of an older males drawing room/ living room, where he might read or write novels. For the wallpaper we decided it was too white so we brainstormed ways to make it a little bit more dingy, we came up with the idea of using coffee granules and water and using a sponge or brush to spread it around, this had such an amazing effect on the walls, it looked like the walls were wet with mould and damp, we even soaked tissue in the coffee mixture and just threw them at the wall for them to stick, which was also very effective. A personal inspiration of mine when dressing the set was from a ‘Coen brothers’ film, ‘Barton Fink’ during the film the hotel room in which the character stays in is quite dingy, he is also a writer so he sits at his desk with a picture above, the room felt quite oppressive and isolated which is what we wanted to convey with this set. We decorated the set with antique pictures and built our own table using some of the storage boxes and a piece of fabric, we created a wilting bunch of flowers in a vase by taking some old faux flowers and bending them downwards and then gaffa taping them to an ornate candle stick holder that we found. I really enjoyed being this creative and solving problems that arose in this way, I feel that creating an aesthetic is something that I am quite competent at and this module gave me an excuse to use my creative side more.

While filming the piece I feel this is where the cracks started to form for the project, we were all so happy with the set and it had become so overcomplicated that we almost neglected the fact that we were going to have to film in it. I had drawn up a story board for the piece and it was too long so I kept cutting things out and trying to make sure we still had time to light our set which brings me to our second visual effect. We still had a visual effect that involved shadow’s to go on, we intended to have a moving shadow on the wall of a window frame, this was supposed to mimic what happens when a car goes past a window, this was intended to give the illusion that the set was bigger than it was. I feel that this effect was quite experimental as none of us had worked with shadows before, and we hadn’t seen any other films with this kind of effect in. We used a cardboard piece with a small cut out of a window and then used a spotlight behind. I feel that this attempt was unsuccessful, but had the potential to have worked nicely if we had of practised the technique beforehand but we didn’t have a chance to get into the studio to do so.

Our final special effect was the green screen, in the story board I planned for the camera to be in a position to maximise the effect of the green screen, due to time restraints I think these shots suffered, but during the edit after quite a lot of tweaking it started to work, on of our downfalls was that because we had used slightly off green insulation spray inside the wall, it was interfering with the green screen when we got round to edit. I put the clips into a sequence in final cut and we extracted the clips that needed to be put into after effects.

Here are some photo’s I took in the initial stages of the edit.

Using after effects to chroma key the green screen.

Learning to use after effects in a seminar.

Putting the images into a sequence in final cut.

When we got into after effects with the green screen we started by opening up the chroma key option, and turning the green to red so that we could see where our problem areas were going to be, we started by using the on screen ‘dropper’ to try and match the green areas that had not been included, we then used the spill suppressor to correct any more areas that we had missed, we were at an advantage as we were using a static shot, and as you can see in the photo above we practiced on another groups project, whose image was not static. This proved very difficult to do as we had thought it would be, in retrospect it might have been quite an interesting challenge to use a moving shot but for this module I’m glad that we didn’t. We pulled in a static image from google of a library, we then put this into the green screen, but this didn’t seem like enough so Kyle filmed himself in a green morph suit and threw some pages from a book around for us to overlay on top. The result of this method was quite uncanny in itself, as it looked as though the pages had a life force of their own, it was a bit of a interesting end to our piece, not one that we had planned to the failure of using the shot with the character looking back at himself. We had toyed around with the idea of compositing on top of the picture frames, we weren’t sure if we were going to have time to do this but as the green screen part of our piece didn’t take as long as we had expected we decided to use this method. Kyle and Sian filmed themselves as portraits, and composited this onto the picture frames, I feel this added a little more depth to the project. I think we really pushed our abilities with this piece and I am more confident in my artistic abilities, I feel we worked really well as a team it was a nice change to work with two students that I hadn’t worked with before.

Academic resources I used were Freud’s essay on the uncanny, I feel this was useful to me as it outlined some of the key concepts of the genre, and helped us build our story around these concepts and kept us inline while we were coming up with our intial idea, while I was building the set I was also reading the sandman, this text was suggested to us during lesson time but I found reading through some of the chapters really helped me engage with the module as it was helpful to get a feel for the uncanny genre and some of the plot developments that could occur, and how the use of metaphor affected the plot.

I really enjoyed this project I found it a challenge but I found that the texts given were interesting and captivating, it was different but I feel I found my strength lied in the initial concept for the idea and the set building rather than the after effects part of the module.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTBrOePe0dc This is a youtube tutorial that I used to brush up on my green screen knowledge after the seminar.

Bibliography.

Freud, S. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 

E.T.A Hoffman (1816). The sandman. Germany: N/A. N/A.