ba3aheatherspersonalshowcase

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Colour grading a horror film

I wanted to look into how to colour grade a horror film and what gives the best effects. It seems as though getting rid of any warm tones is what works best. I want to experiment with some colour grading now on my film to see what effect I can give it.

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Colour Grading

I experiment with a number of different colour grades with my film. I went for colour filters, as well as just keeping it simple and just adding more sharpness to the piece and a little more detail and depth. I think keeping it simple with the colour grading has worked best as the lighting that I used for the set is already quite dark so adding anything else is either making it grainy or too dark that you cant view the action.

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Week 13

This week I went back into the studio Monday and Tuesday to re film some of my animation. I wasn’t happy with how my animation had turned out over christmas so I booked a tutorial with Helen early Monday and received some good feedback about what I needed to change. This helped me with going into filming straight after and I planned out the shots I needed to create and how to do them. This has helped me create a much more successful film that makes a lot more sense to a viewer. There are still some kinks that I am unhappy with but considering the problems I occurred with both puppets I am happy with what I have managed to created.

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Evaluation

Overall, I feel I have succeeded with what I wanted to achieve through this project. Although I did not end up making a horror, there are still aspects of all the research I conducted that I was able to fit into the film hopefully making it more successful and readable as a narrative. 

My biggest concern coming into this project was the narrative, my skills in story writing are not the strongest, so in order to be able to create something successful, although aware we did not have to create a narrative, I conduced a lot and most of my research into how horror films are written, what works and what doesn't. This really helped me to begin to understand the genre a lot more and also helped me realise some of the cliches in it that I should steer away from, which brought up the idea of not making something noticeably horror with jump scares etc.. just to play on the idea of a scary character. 

I did have issues with the animation of the puppet. The head was far to heavy making it difficult for the puppet to balance itself and meant that I had to make shift a rig to keep him held up. This worked well and helped with the animation but it still came with its difficulties making the animation lack slightly. I worked with what I had however and tried to make the best out of the not so great situation and with not being happy with half of my film at the end of the filming week I made the decision to go back in to the studio after the christmas break and re animate, which was the right decision as I am now far happier with what has been produced. 

If I was to complete this project again I would look into more materials other than latex. Although this did work and give the overall effect that I wanted, it would have been interesting to have a little more time to be able to experiment with other materials to see what effect they could give.

I would also consider multiple designs for the ladybug to see what effect different colours and shapes could give this character, I place so much of my time and focus on the main puppet and the set that the ladybug took a back seat.

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I had some issue working out what to call my piece so looked at this website with some tips on how best to title it. This made me realise that keeping it simple is most important. 

I initially had the idea of just using the word scared, or a word similar. 

But ended with the idea of ‘TOOTH’ simple and it relevant to what is happening in the short.

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Final edit

I might still play around with the colour correction of this but I am overall happy now with the final outcome.

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I went back into the studio after the christmas break as I wasn’t happy with how my animation had turned out. I went and spoke to Helen before filming and she clarified to me what had gone wrong and what I needed to do to fix this.

She suggested adding more close up shots inbetween the end shot as this is quite a long shot and it needs something more to give the viewer a clear idea of what is going on.

Also to mess around with the timing, some of the timing was off in the first few shots, just to extend these so the viewer has time to realise what it happening.

The overall general comment was also to simplify the movement, this worked well to split up the movement and give more time for the animation to make more sense to a viewer. However this did double the time of the animation it has helped the narrative a lot more.

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Music Credit (note to self)

Music: http://www.purple-planet.com

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Overall this filming week was challenging. This is the first time I've had a puppet not being able to stand up on its own so adjusting to this challenge I found stressful. However what I am happy about is that I was able to realise this before my filming week by doing some practice filming a week in advance. This meant that I was prepared for this challenge and didn’t hit a dead end as soon as I had begun.

I am very pleased with the over all look and timing of the first 15 seconds of this piece. Where it starts to fall is the last section. The timing is ok in sections of this and I was able to get this to a better point by adding in more frames where I wanted certain actions to hold to give more of a arc in the movement. 

I have booked one more day when we return from christmas break to see if I want to film this last bit again and rework it during the break. But I want to see it as a film piece first, with sound and maybe an adjustment to some more timing changes to see what the overall look is and whether it would be worth the extra day. 

I am very happy with how the lighting turned out this was way worth spending the first day of my filming working trying to get right and this was super important for the overall look of my piece and helps it look professional. 

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These are all the lighting tests that I went through on the first day of filming. I needed the lighting to be right to set the right mood for the film from second 1.

One thing that set me back and made me change the lighting from my original set up that I had constructed from test days I had was that I needed to background to have as little light on it as possible. This didnt work as well as I had hoped creating a shiny surface when the lights were on it and it didnt create as much depth to the scene as hoped. So keeping the lighting only on the foreground was the main goal. I also had issues with the quality when the scene got too dark, but this was fixed after a discussion with John who let me know that it was the file size, exporting as a .h264 and there are ways to get the bigger quality footage in after effects. 

I am happy I spend quite a few hours getting this right as it really is the most important last set to getting the atmosphere you want out of the film.

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Turn around of ladybug

This is my ladybug character. This ended up being my favourite out of the two and i know want to go and create more creatures like this in future animation as I had a lot of fun working with Barry to create this. The only issue is that the wing joints were very fragile and one broke before even filming and the other broke while filming meaning I had to improvise with blue tac to hold the wing up. This worked but it was much easier to control the movement from the wire joint. This is something that if i was to do again, id try to work our different ways that this can be achieved, to make a more flexible joint that won't break after a few bends. 

However the overall look worked really well. The plastic for the wings creates a shine that the bug would have and the latex on the legs helps create some realism even though it is disproportionate to a real life ladybug.

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Turn around of main character 

After how long I had worked on this puppet I was very pleased with the outcome. The latex dipping worked very well to add texture to the arms and legs but not so much that it draws away from everything else. The head I was most happy with creating something that was different and similar to my initial designs. 

I had some issues when it came to the creation of this monster, which is why it took me so many weeks to get right and still in the end it wasnt perfect. 

He couldn’t actually stand on his own. He needed heavier and stiffer legs to be able to hold him upright on one leg, as well as a use of a different material for the head as this was heavy. This made animating complicated, as I had to tie some cotton around his neck and attach it to a pole above him on set, something that I hadn't experimented with before or the best way to do this to still be able to create dynamic movement and this let some of the animation down slightly. But i tried as hard as possible to keep all the movements in that I wanted.

aside from this the overall look is exactly what I wanted and this helped with the overall tone of the film. He is quite grotesque which as a viewer will hopefully make you fear him but as the film goes on there is a certain sympathy and cuteness to him.

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I put together a short speed video of my filming days, to show how I put together the set as well as how I planned out some of the movements.

I had a lot of trouble with the rigging of the two characters, this was the biggest hurdle of me these two filming days and you can see in some of the footage how much of a struggle this was. If I was to create this again Id think ahead and plan a better way of rigging the character as I wasnt aware that this was something that I would need to consider till a week before filming; after the test days. 

However the set did come toegther well and this was something that was one of my biggest worries when it came to filming. But the use of moss tied the background, ground and trees together.

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Week 12

This was my filming week. I started Tuesday and spent the day getting the set set up exactly how I wanted it to, making sure everything would be in frame, as well as spending a lot of time messing around with lighting. As although I had done multiple tests with lighting, as soon as the set was placed in this changed how it needed to be set up so I spend a good amount of time making sure this was right for the tone of the film and did a quick animation test with this to make sure this was the look that i wanted. The other 3 days I did multiple takes of all of the shots that I wanted to create. This meant that I was able to pick out my favourites at the end of the week and work out what movements worked best with the storyline I was aiming for. This was a lot more difficult than anticipated, with one, never having animated two characters at the same time before, as well as both being attached by rigs, and having a lot of issues with these rigs. The wings also broke on the ladybug again but this blue tac method seemed to work well enough for them breaking to not cause too much issue. This was a successful well overall but I am still unhappy with the way my final scene turned out so I ended up booking an extra day in the studio when we return from the holidays, this gives me time to re evaluate the ending and change it to make it make more sense and to be abel to work not the timing.

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This was more so to test out the lighting to see what effect the set up I had would give and whether the quality would also be decent, even if it was dimly lit.

This came out a little too dark and from this I focus much more of the lighting and working out what looked bests and I have complied a video of all of these lighting tests that I went through after this one which will be one of the next few posts I make. 

Doing this first animation tests as well helped me realise how I need him to move more slowly and more suspiciously to make it more obvious he's hiding from something. There wasn’t enough anticipation for the viewer.

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There is still some improvements to be made but from my original two animatics I created this and this is now more along the lines of how I want my story to play out, as well as helping give me a more definite answer about how long this story actually is. 

This is now going to help me when it comes to filming next week. I want to fit one final iteration of this in before next week but will priorities my puppet and set being fully complete before this.

The main animation principles I need to keep in mind while filming to make the movements work well and read to the audience.

Arc

secondary action

Timing - This one is going to be most important to be able to get the narrative across to a viewer.

Anticipation

Staging

Follow through and overlapping action

Ease in and ease out