Awath Animation

Cinematography Research

2013-05-16T14:36:00.000+01:00

RUBY SPARKS- Matthew Libatique

In the movie ruby Sparks, the main character is a wrier and he has to come up with a story quickly. Everytime he passes out or sleeping he always dreams about the same dream and a girl but he cant see her, she is always blurred out. Every time he dreams he gets closer to seeing her face and he ends up waking up due to his alarm set off or something woke him up.

I love how vibrant the colours are during his dreamy sequences and shows a happy thought and memory. I wanted something like this for the flashback sequence.

I have a similar scene like this i shot outside in the park, and for my flashback i will make this scene more colourful and add a glow to it to give it a dreamy feel.

PROMETHEUS- Dariusz Wolski

I love prometheus cinematography, it is very clean but the colours are beautiful. throughout the movie the cinematography look is like the matrix, it has a green tint to it. And for this I was thinking to use it for my short film

MATRIX RELOADED- Bill Pope

the matrix has a green look to it, most outdoor scenes have more greens and blues and less warm colours. I did something similar to this in the first test i did with my classmate andy as the main character.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK- Jeff Cronenweth
The Social network is similar to matrix, but this is more of a David Fincher look to all of his films. He always have the same cinematography and this is one of the things that makes his a memorable auteur.

SHAME- Sean Bobbitt

Relapse- Final Video!

2013-05-15T14:06:00.002+01:00

SHOOTING LOCATIONS

WEATHER

during filming in the first week, i got some amazing scenes and footages. The sun was bright and everything looked pretty good and well lit.

Second week of filming the snow was cleared and ended up shooting the second half of the story. When editing i could not use the snow scenes as story was supose to take place in one day.

It was such a shame to cut these scenes out and not use them. They were key part of the story and so i had to use the scenes i had without the snow and mirror them when i reuse them to fill the missing scenes. that i cut off.

i had used some low angle shots (macro) and different angles for each take and in the end i did not use them because the audience will see the snow in scenes and others didnt.

TIME OF THE DAY

Relapse- Title Animation

2013-05-14T18:56:00.002+01:00

i had not thought about title during my filming and stoyboarding. I left this till the end because i wanted to see the final look and the tone shown of the final video and then think of an appropriate title for my short film.

i did not want to name it something obvious that will tell the audience or gove away what the story is about. But i also wanted a title that is relevant and to have a meaning that when someone sees the video will see the title is perfectly named.

I started asking couple people for title ideas and all seemed to be coming up with similar titles. As i was showing Laura the work i did for her for feedback, i mentioned my short story plotline and asked her for name suggestion. She came up with "Relapse". i thought it was brilliant and not too revealing but same time it is a description of the story.

Post Production- Masking

2013-05-10T18:13:00.000+01:00

The video above was the first test i did for Laura to do post production work for her. It had a lot of problems for me to fix and ended up having a bac outcome. The camera was not in focus in most of the time and blurryness everywhere. Also lighting was huge issue for me when editing it. I could not do anything about it.

Then i had asked her to re shoot the video again and this time to do it slower pace and lighting to be consistant. also the camera to focus on everything. I thought it would be easier to add blurr and focus in post using after effects and lighting too. change exposure and keyframe them to have similar effect as the first one looking like lighting and thunder and windy blowing the house.

i had similar problems with this as the first video. lighting changes in couple of frames and it affects the masking when video moves to those frames, you can see the harsh lines from masking. i tried playing a round with the opacity and feathering but it made it worse and looking more obvious that it was masked out and that something used to be there.

Post Production- Cloning

2013-05-10T18:04:00.000+01:00

Post Production

2013-05-10T17:53:00.000+01:00

Untitled Story- Refined Colour Correction

2013-05-10T13:48:00.000+01:00

When i finished rendering my final video with colour correction. I double checked make sure nothing missing. Then wheb i got home and viewed it again over the big screen tv i noticed the whole video became darker. I was surprised to see this as i checked and knew before i left university where i was doing my rendering, it looked fine.

I decided that next day i will improve on the colour correction and brightness to fix this problem.

So the picture above shows the refined version before and after. ( left to right) i noticed by increasing the reds a litte on the curves effect and reduce the blue brightens the picture a little and add a nice touch of warm colour. but still not loose the cold blue/greenish tone look.

When i increase the brightness it reduces the quality of the video and the darker shadowy parts become grainy, it becomes less constrast and looks washed out. so i did not end up using brightness and constract effect.

For the part where the character feels dizzy and flashbacks are about to start, i did a test of distorting the video to show how he feels and sees, using a first person angle.

When i re did the scene again i wanted to do the same effect but use the first person shot minimal and to only show the starting point of him feeling the effect of dizzyness and lighth-headedness.

Untitled Story- Colour Correction Research

2013-05-09T18:22:00.000+01:00

When researching about colour correction, I have to first know about what colours go with what. I looked at colour wheel which gives you the palette and what colours compliments which. This was very helpful in knowing the tone and the look of what I wanted to go for.

For the present time I wanted something dull and less interesting, lifeless. And for the flashbacks It was going to be more vibrant and colourfull, increase the colours and maybe add a little gaussian blur effect to the flashback to give that dreamy shiny look. I want my audience to see how happy his memories were/are and how different it is now, and wonder what happened. Even though I'm not going to explore what has happend to the character, the ending and flashbacks should somehow tell you. In the end you get to realised it was the hospital he was in at the beginning and you get to see the woman by the window is the nurse that saved him in the end.

The Video below is my first colour correction test I did. The feedback I got was to make it easier for the audience to tell apart the flashback to the real time events.

So What I did was colour correct individually all the present scenes to look same and the flashback to have a different colour scheme. I will upload the updated version on another post.

Untitled Story- Colour Correction

2013-05-09T16:32:00.002+01:00

Colour Correction/ Grading is one of the funnest part to do in editing. I started doing this in my second year when working on advertisement project about Hydration. I did a colour correction for it and I quite enjoyed the process to make the video and the colour pop or show the mood you want to show on the video. If its post apocalyptic world then it is normally less saturated and more dull colours. For happy scenes it is colourfull and vibrant.

If its post apocalyptic world then it is normally less saturated and more dull colours. For happy scenes it is colourfull and vibrant.

Untitled Story- Time-Lapse

2013-05-09T16:05:00.002+01:00

One of the shots had in mind was to do a timelapse to show the character lost and the passage of time. One of the ideas was the end scene to be night scene. So We had to show a timelapse to show the day going and transition to night scene.

In the end did't end up using the night scene and thought it might be usefull too in the story to show character spending whole day looking for someone or walking throughout the day.

For the time passing you see the trees and the character moving really fast and I only wanted to show the clouds moving not the rest. So I ended up masking the clouds in the reflection only so everything else will be still. I duplicated the footage and then masked the top footage the reflection part only. The footage below I chose a frame I wanted and the freeze framed that shot so it stays same while the clouds move only.

I had to also feather a little the the mask to blend with the footage below so the masked footage does not look cut out and hard edges.

Untitled Short- Tests

2013-05-04T17:11:00.002+01:00

We shot these blank scenes during filming so we could add the actress later in post. We couldn't get her to come as often during the filming dates, so we shot these empty and then when we had her come for other scenes we took photos of her matching the shot of the scenes and angles in mind.

Then on photoshop mask her out and add her to the footage we want. The I track motion the video and transfered the tracked frames to the girl so she moves with the camera and seem like she actually in the shot at the time, but the lighting was not perfect. To match the lighting with the video, had to use curves and match the colour and contrast so fits perfectly and not seem like it was jammed in the shot.

(RVJ sketch idea of photoshop the girl in another scene which she was not in at the time)

The video below is one of the cuts/video I used to the story to make it longer and makes sense. I needed a wide angle shot and a beautiful background location. We had shot some tests few weeks before and that day there was snow everywhere still havent cleared out. It looked awkward using these in the story as the rest of the scenes were in sunny day and this is in middle scene with snow. Still thought they were good scenes to use, We could not go to reshoot the scenes because we had to time left and we went over our timeline dates. It was in the week where we should be working in post. I just had to use the videos we had at the time.

Untitled Short- Feeling Dizzy

2013-05-04T16:23:00.003+01:00

Untitled Short- Reflection Effect

2013-05-04T16:14:00.000+01:00

Untitled Story- Transition 2

2013-05-03T18:15:00.000+01:00

Untitled Story- Tree Transition

2013-05-03T18:03:00.003+01:00

I wanted to do something different to cut from a scene to another.

I started off by masking the tree so as the tree goes off camera so does the scene

then I animated the postion for the another scene to follow the tree as it goes off screen and the new scene to take over the view.

The camera of the second scene was too shaky and did not look good. I had to motion track it to smooth the movement, I tracked the position and the rotation.

Untitled Story- Tests

2013-05-03T17:21:00.000+01:00

One of the end flashback was to reveal the woman main character bumps into at the begining is actual same girl that he wakes up to see after the fall.

I did this test shot of what It might look like at that stage

I did also a scene before he falls, he blacks out and realises he is in another place and feeling dizzy.

Untitled Short Story- Storyboard

2013-05-03T16:39:00.000+01:00

For the collaborative project, I decided to work with my classmate Brian. I had an idea of what my story was about but there was no storyline. It was about a guy walking and remembering things. Brian had idea to add more to the stroryline.

A guy walking to to go see someone before something happend to him. We though of the storyline and what scenes will have after another. I came up with some sketches of camera angels and ways to introduce different scenes.

Later we put everything together and Brian did the final storyboard below that we can work on during filming process.

Research- Inspiration

2013-04-06T15:08:00.004+01:00

Journey- Final Cut

2013-04-06T15:01:00.002+01:00

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This is my final cut edit I did for my short s tory about journey. I did some colour correction . Tested out different colour tones and tint. Then for a cinematic look I added the famous black bars top and bottom for a widescreen look.
Also added some lense flares to add the cinema look and add a bit of class to the look.

Journey- Editing In After Effects

2013-04-06T14:54:00.001+01:00

Here i was trying to stretch the time and figure out how much time each shot will use before cutting to another angle and view.

After timing them i would add colour correction using curves and tint effects and then later add some lens flares to give a cinematic look

i did some research about the cinematic look and the aspect ratio and black vars. Then i used the action title safe guide and made custom wide screen look

Then spent more time colour correcting and bringing the vibrance up and highlight some colours like the blues and reds. i reduced the green by a touch to give a cooler feel to it.

Here this footage i took i did not use a steadycam, i ended up using the camera hand held and shoot this scene while moving really quickly. My hand was shaking and the video looked bad and unstable. i decided to find a way to track and reduce the shaking. i used stabilise motion tracker and track the rotation and motion. X and Y.

it resulted in a better footage but problem was because it was too shaky, the would be black bars coming in and out the action frame.which means i had to zoom in a lot to not see them. i startes off a medium shot and ended with close up.

Tutorial- After Effects Camera Stabilisation

2013-04-06T14:38:00.001+01:00

Since some of my shots will be hand held, I will be needing to use stabilisation in after effects to keep the movement to a minimum and smooth. Mostly I will be using hand held camera shots when showing close up shots and reaction. I did do a test and the stabilisation was not as good. There was a lot of glitches and for that I will be needing to learn how to stabilise the camera well

Tutorials- tracking in After Effects

2013-04-06T14:33:00.003+01:00

Research- Camera effects

2013-04-06T14:31:00.002+01:00

Tilt shift is one of the techniques I wanted to do.Mainly tilt shift is used as time lapse and make things look miniaturised.I will be filming long periods of time and then add the tilt shift effects in post. As part of the short story I will be doing, at a point in the storyline there will be a time lapse to show time passing. Instead of using a simple fade to show time pass, I thought tilt shift would work great.

In my second year of university, my tutor showed us some after effects techniques videos for inspiration. One of the examples showed was an advert made for ESPN football advert. It was in Tilt shift and it look amazing. Everything looked fake and surreal Like they were made of plastic and stop motion like effect.

Cinematography

2013-03-11T11:38:00.001+00:00

I looked at many Cinematographers for my work and get the feel of what the colour tone will be like in my film. I went out around City centre to look at locations of which I can shoot my scenes.

I edited them using my iPad app called Photoforge 2 and After effects on my computer. Mainly used Curves, vibrance, brightness and saturation and tint effects to add and change colours to suit what I want my final video to look like.

These locations had to have interesting buildings or environments around them to film. I wanted to have a great location and background to give atmosphere.

Also time of the day was important to get the perfect colour. In post production you can always change the colour tone and change time from sunny to rainy, but works better if you already got the weather or time shot exact or similar time.

Visual Effects Inspiration - The Da Vinci Code

2013-02-17T13:06:00.001+00:00