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Evaluation

When given this brief I was so nervous to make sure it was good. I had a lot of ideas but wanted to try and focus on cinematography more. I think now maybe I should’ve pushed myself to attempt more visual effects. An open brief intimidates me I think, I just can’t narrow it down myself, I like being given a project that’s a bit more specific and narrowing down from there. I liked a lot of my original ideas but kind of just went with a risk getting inspiration from something online that wasn’t my story.

I decided to do this project entirely on my own without anyone’s help because I think in the past I just want to follow my idea through and then if I’m using my family as well it’ll be easy to direct him and more comfortable so in theory it would turn out nicer as I had more time as well. It didn’t really turn out that way although it was quite nice filming alone, it took a lot more time setting up and i still had the same frustrations as working with someone else which I thought would go away. 

What I like about the video is the colour grade I think I did a decent job as it wasn’t white balanced as often as I should have. I also had a lot of fun colour grading Rasmus’ work that was probably my favourite part of this whole project to be honest. He had such great footage, shot perfectly and I could learn a bit more about Davinci which was quite intuitive to pick up actually! I like how the tapes have come together, just the look of them feels nostalgic. I also like the composition and location, I’m glad I could shoot at my Grandma’s house because it just had this old person vibe that I wanted. I think my dad was a decent actor as well.

I don’t like that the narrative of the story is a bit weak. I kind of just scrambled at the end to think of something because I gave up on the original idea of the ebay ad because to be honest most of the shots that I shots for it just looked bad anyway so I wanted to think of a different narrative with the shots I’ve got. Which in hindsight probably wasn’t a great idea and I should’ve just stuck with the original narrative. That’s the worst thing about the video for me. Oh also the visual effects are pretty bad, the nuke file was massive and doing every little thing it could to help get it right but for some reason it just doesn’t blend in nicely, I think it’s because the screen is so flat there’s no reflection or anything so I couldn’t really give it much depth.

Overall, I think I didn’t enjoy filming this project as much as I thought, when I was actually behind the camera it was generally good it was just moving all the equipment and setting up and things would’ve gone with more ease if someone was with me to help out. If I’d fully thought through the narrative a bit more beforehand it would’ve turned out a lot nicer. In the long run, I want to do less emotional things because I don’t want tojust be creating the same type of things, it’ll get boring. So going to try and mix it up next year and hopefully delve more into cinematography, VFX and colour grading.

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Final Video

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Audio

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The render keeps banding at the credits! Rasmus suggested it was gaussian blur so I think I’m gonna use another blur.

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For the tape footage, reacting to Geraint’s feedback, I scaled it down, added a grey solid and used it as an alpha matte, then I blurred it so the edges were blurred. Then I added an adjustment layer with optics compensation effect on so it looked more like an old style tv. Then I added another adjustment layer and masked out the sides and brightened them up using levels to push this effect further.

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Credits

For the credits at the end. I wanted to have the footage incorporated into it somehow to let people reflect on their memories. I did this by writing the text, making sure it’s white, then making a new comp bringing in the footage, using gaussian blur to blur it a lot so it was unrecognisable then using the text as an alpha matte for the text. I adjusted the position and scale because it kept either moving too fast so it was relaxing to watch or too colourful. I wanted to ensure a lot of skin tones were seen so it was easy to tell that it was a video playing in the background not just random colours.

In premiere, then I added the footage underneath, also blurred. In hindsight I could’ve just used a different overlay. Then faded it out at the end.

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Geraint Feedback

I asked for some feedback from Geraint even though it’s probably too late to change too much. He liked it but said I should add some credits at the end and change the view of the tape footage so it looks more old and means the viewer is focusing on the footage.

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Final Node Graph

Nuke was the most struggling part of this project and it took a lot of time getting it right. It doesn’t look perfect in the end but you know it isn’t too bad! Tom and Jack were really helpful for this.

After getting some feedback from Geraint he suggested making the screen brighter so I went back into nuke and changed it. I added more glow as well and moved where it was in the graph.

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Rasmus Help

I helped Rasmus all day yesterday and some of today with colour grading. He had other work to do so I could finish the grade and then get his feedback afterwards. I enjoyed this a lot and found it so satisfying colour grading this well shot footage.

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More colour correcting and grading.

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I made sure to colour correct all of the footage first, then grade it then add any effects like flares etc.

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I tried a few different colour grades. I was originally going to brighten up his eye slightly but I think it looks a bit unnatural. I also tried changing the colour of the back wall that is a bit yellow. It looked okay when it was grey however the edges were weirdly rigid and harsh so it was too obvious it had been changed.

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Grading

I debated for a while over whether to completely black out the inside or not because the flowers look quite nice but my original idea was this look so I’m sticking with it.

After a lot of tests I decided to have a sort of green tinge to it because it looks quite natural but still a bit depressing.

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Denoising

I used Neat Video to denoise in after effects by replacing with an after effects composition. I worked really well.

I didn’t denoise all the clips as it lost some detail in his hand on some parts so I used remove grain instead so I could control how much grain was removed. This shows the before and after of remove grain.

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I really wanted the sun to produce a flare on the camera when I was filming however I couldn’t get the angle right so I added it in post and I think it looks good. It just adds a little bit of a soft gradient on the image. These pictures show a before and after.

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Meaning

I think you can take a lot of meanings away from this video:

I want the video to give the idea that time goes fast and you need to cherish what you have while you still have it. I think I’m going to title it something like ‘where did all the time go’.

Or a man with dementia thinks his wife is dead but realises she’s just gone away for a while and left him notes.

Or his wife has come back to take him up to heaven with her

Or his wife has just been on holiday and he missed her so much he wanted to be with her by watching old tapes.

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Nukeee

Trying to get this key right, so far I’ve used multiple keys, one core key using a primatte then using keylights for a better edge of the screen key and a key for the hair details. I’ve then used hue correct to despill but it’s been showing this kind of ghosting effect which is really annoying so I’ve been rendering out a couple drafts trying different methods and it isn’t looking too great. Tom showed me how to add a light reflection from the TV onto his shoulder so it looks more fit into the scene which I think will look great. I just need to fix this hair thing and I’ll be alright.