Bsc Digital Arts and Technology

I should have known something was bound to go wrong the project was running too smoothly for me which is unusual, and now I’ve hit an obstacle.

  I imported the filming we did, and then tried to play around with it in after effects to get the distort right…however no matter how many masks I put on it I can’t seem to get rid of all the background without getting rid of them!

  I’ll work on it really hard on getting most of the background masked out and it’ll look fine, but then the scene plays on and because their moving the colours change and different parts of the background and them disappear!

  That was for the digging so I thought I’ll have a break from that and do the world war 2 scene, which I didn’t think would be too difficult as their fairly still and are under blankets…but the background is white and one of the boxes their holding is white, and one blanket which is green comes up whitish on the screen so also disappears.

  this leaves Simon with floating head, it occasional blogs out Ken’s blanket too which is more blueish. So I just have to do my best, render it (which takes ages because my laptop isn’t that fast) and show Chris Speed tomorrow!

  But it does look like I will need to do some more filming asap as I only have a week before presenting it and I’m working all weekend!

I’ve sort of given up on doing the timeline for the moment, thought I’ll have a bit of a break from it…and instead work on turning the scenes I filmed yesterday into holograms!I have about 3 different clips of us digging, with us standing at different angles, with different lighting so I’ve got to try it all out first to check see which one is the best clip to use for the final thing.

Once I chosen which clip, I then changed the effects, which didn’t take me too long but it wasn’t as distorted as I wanted it to be so I’ve changed it since then and I spent most of the time getting the timings right so that it worked out fine and looked ok.

I then had to repeat this for the War Scene also, although I only have one clip for that…I also had to make sure that both the War and the Digging scenes were consistent with the effects and the timings so that everything would fit together and not look as if two different people did it.I

know that doesn’t make much sense but it does to me lol.

Below are the two holographic scenes that I’ve done and uploaded onto youtube. The first is of us digging and the second of is of us huddling in an air raid shelter in world war 2.

I’m a bit stressed at the moment, I’m trying to figure out how best to get the timeline to move across the floor effectively, which is proving more tricky than I hoped it would.

The footage I filmed yesterday with the plank didn’t work quite as well as I hoped, I was able to mask out my foot, and change the colour of that to blueish to fit in with the scenes and the photo’s which will appear on the floor as they walk along it. But in order for me to do that I had to place the same video onto the timeline twice and then mask out bits of both video to show the floor and then the plank…but as the timeline went on bits of the plank on the floor layer where showing and vice a versa.

This resulted in pretty pants video, and doing it on the wall didn’t work either, as you couldn’t tell it was on the wall, and I wanted to fit in the hand rail so that the people would know they were walking down the stairs (a bit hard to explain).

And the worst thing is, I need to get this sorted for tomorrow as it’s the last day I’ll be able to test it before the presentation date.

Now I’m really stuck on what to do…and I haven’t even gotten round to doing the scene footage yet, and that takes hours to render!

Great day of me turning 20 it is lol

Yesterday I went and booked a green-screen room for today, because I needed to film the whole thing again, to try and get the right footage.

Filming against a green screen should make it easier for me to mask out the background and to get rid of most of the extra colours using colour keys which means when they do move in the film most of them won’t disappear quite so much.

I also got them to wear dark clothes with as little amount of green as possible, Ken couldn’t make it this time (it was short notice) so I had to stand in instead, I hate being filmed but I kept my head down and with the distortions I’ll add you shouldn’t be able to check it’s me…I hope.

Not only did I bring everything back the spade, ruck sack, and pickaxes I also brought in a massive bag with a tri-pod in so that the camera would stay still…as when I held it it did move or jerk a bit. Although with the wave effects you can’t really tell.

But luckily it all went well, I also got Simon to film Portland Square for me as my footage wasn’t the best used…I also couldn’t figure out how I could get the timeline to follow the way they walk so I brought in a plank of wood to push along the floor with my foot as I moved (will mask my foot out)

When we got to Portland Square though their was a career’s fair setting up, so we couldn’t really film walking right through it, just ouside the lecture theatre’s, and a tiny section of the floor, which I’m just going to have to repeat..

Got to capture the video now, and hopefully this time it’ll work! Fingers Crossed!

I did do a bit of a demo from the video I filmed on Thursday to Chris Speed, he seemed to like it, said that’s what he think it should look like or something similar…I’m still not happy with it though, as you can’t see what’s going on in the scene as all you can see is a slightly blue white background…which is still in the rectangle shape of the composition in After Effects.

Anyway I thought I’ll show you a bit of the film I did

Today I took in my Dad’s HDV camera, a spade, a big ruck sack, some pickaxes, and some blankets oh as well as some little boxes to film my willing volunteers Simon, Claudia, Ollie and Ken. 

They’ll be digging using the spade and pickaxes for the Drake’s Leat part of the film, and then huddled together for the World War II scene.  

We didn’t know where to film, they didn’t want to act in too much of a public area, so Portland Square was out, instead we filmed it on the 3rd floor of the Scot Building where you can control the lighting and also it’s all white so be easier to get rid of the background using masks.

I would show you the video that I filmed, but because it filmed in HD it won’t open in anything other than Premiere which won’t allow me to compress it down enough for the web…but keep checking for me to change it.

Last night I couldn’t sleep very well, I kept waking up and not being able to breathe usual cold symptons so I was unable to make it to my meeting with Chris Speed this week, which does mean I haven’t seen him for 2 weeks because of him being away last week.

However that does not mean I haven’t been working on anything since last week! In the past week I’ve been searching for footage of people in an air raid shelter during the war, because if I can get real live video rather than my friends acting out it would look more realistic.

But no matter where I looked, on many royalty free sites, youtube etc. I couldn’t find any footage from inside a shelter, I did have some footage of Plymouth being rebuilt from a DVD called ‘Rising From The Ashes’ which I cut down in Premiere to see if I could use it.

After viewing the footage I imported from that DVD I realised it didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the project, as most of it was just bits of Plymouth after the war, and not much to do with Portland Square, which wasn’t even showed, so I decided not to include it in the project.

I also found some footage of a lady finding a public shelter with a siren going off, when I imported this into After Effects to change the colour and distort it, it wouldn’t allow me not sure why, so I won’t be able to use that…it was still worth a try though.

After reading through the tutorial I thought I’ll give it ago, just to show Chris what I’ve got.  

The website give you all the support materials which you need, this is handy as it means I don’t have to attempt the first go on my own video (which is what I’ll be using for the actual project)

I have to admit it did take me longer than I expected it to to complete, but considering it was the first time I’ve done anything like this as well as using after effects I’m quite proud of it.

Below is a couple of seconds long sample of the hologram video I’ve just finished in After Effects

Now I know what to do for the hologram I need to find out how!   

My first thought, would be to do something in Premiere, perhaps have two video clips laid on top of each other, and change the opacity of the other two…however that doesn’t quite give the holograhic look more of a ghost style. Although that does distort the video, it’s not quite what I’m looking for. 

After quite some time typing various things into google, I’ve found the best tutorial! It can be found  here  http://www.computerarts.co.uk/__data/arts_pdfs/tdw66_lead.pdf  

As you can see it runs through every step to get the effect you need. It’s perfect, I’ll have to look at it some more later on. 

My second meeting with Chris went well I think, I have something to do for our next meeting which is in two weeks.  As I am going with the idea of ghost likes figures in my video’s Chris suggest I do something similar to a method used in Star Wars when Princess Leia leaves a hologram message for Obi-Wan Kenobi. So for our next meeting I have to do a bit of a video test.