VFX Production - Letter to Actress & Make Up Artist

For all ideas taken into consideration I have chosen the actress 'Sophie Jude' to to play the role I need.

I think she is perfect for the piece, one she is a dancer so she knows how to move very fluidly and effortlessly. I also decided to go with the blonde hair because there will be information in the footage for the light of my wisp fx to interact with. With my make up artist being 'Kirsty Layton' my sister, who is good friends with Sophie they have both happily agreed to travel up together and make a day out of it. Knowing my sister and Sophie being one of her good friends the whole situation will be alot more relaxed while having a fun time getting something done. Below is the document I will be sending to them, it's more for Sophie for what she needs to wear and what not but it includes Kirsty as well.

Letter

Hey, thanks alot for doing this, I hope you can do a serious face! Basically I just need Kirsty to bring her make up stuff because (as per a test shot I did here here) your face needs to be painted like a skull.

If possible could you bring a few things and have your hair in a certain way? Clothes wise I had imagined a white dress (not too flowy but something simple almost night gown like). But in the safest way could you bring a number of things black or white, simple clothes (black top and black leggings would be fine too) nothing too “sassy” that’s going to take attention away from the subject (you). The more options we have the better so just bring you like and we’ll see what looks best.

Your hair all I need is to just be down and natural, I don’t think straight would be best because having a few curls or waves would make the shots more interesting rather than plain. And your hair is blonde or a lighter colour which is great because I make it react more with my special effects after.

Again thank you so much for doing this, I will sort someway out of paying you both for your help. Kirsty will do a awesome job on your make up and you look perfect for the part.

I have the theatre studio where we will be filming from 3PM to - 8:30PM which is plenty of time to get everything, the idea is really simple and I’ll explain it when you get here. I will sort out the rest of the details with Kirsty as to where you guys can park near the uni among everything else.

VFX Production - Actress Details

I have together three candidates for my actress, one is local and the other two are an hours or so drive away. All are very capable of doing the part perfect, though the actress Bethan Grubb is able to do her own make up which is great; killing two birds with one stone. I didn't think I needed to put particularly much detail into each image below as long as you get a quick image of the actress, it's more for their looks and demeanour since there is no audible sound from them.

VFX Production - Equipment & Props

Equipment for Filming

This below is what I believe will be the core essential equipment needed for the shoot on the day. Of course there are the smaller items that fall under each category but they will be checked when securing the equipment. Below I have specified a monitor, this is because booking out all this equipment in one day would be perfect and otherwise a big hassle to do again at another point; I want to make sure the shot is perfect before I decide to start recording.

• Canon 5D M3
• Monitoring TV
• Tripod
• Filming Tracks
• Lights
• Greenscreen [Possibly]

Props Needed

Below is what I decided will be the only needed props for the shoot. UV paint of course is essential to the whole piece. Hopefully my actress will be able to provide a white dress, if not a trip to a charity shop would be perfect in finding something; I will correspond with my actress at that time.

• UV Paint
• White Dress
• UV Lamp
• 3D Tracker Points [Possibly]

Assistance on the Day

I myself am not a makeup artist or a face painter. However want of my potential actresses are trained in that field. I also have a close relative who has years of experience in makeup and special fx makeup, this is most likely going to be my main choice.

Makeup Artists
Name               Kirsty Layton
Location           Nottinghamshire
Charge             Travel Cost & Time / UV Paint (~£50~)

Name               Bethan Grubb
Location           Leeds
Charge             Supply Makeup (~£10~)

VFX Production - Location Details

Leeds College of Art Studio Theatre

The reason I have chosen Leeds College of Art for my shoot location, is that we have a theatre studio has plenty of open space for me to film. As my idea is quite simple and requires no background scenery, I just need a small lit area and the rest will be black. Not to mention with all the equipment being at the college itself, moving equipment will be an easy task. There are also many people on hand who will be around for a short time in case I find a problem that I am unable to overcome.

Proposed Dates

After corresponding with all my contacts, Leeds College of Art Administrator Tom Pollard, make up artist Kirsty Layton and finally my actress Sophie Jude. We have agreed on the 20th of January 2014, the filming times we will be between 3:00PM and 8:30PM. This is ample time for me to get all of my recording done, and for people to be late if circumstances should go that way.

Assistance

As mentioned above the only assistance I require is someone who is able to paint high quality skulls, the actress is obviously going to be doing her job. The filming and lighting I will set up my self, as I need no audio that is a factor I don’t have to worry about; if need be I can get sound fx for footsteps. I have already corresponded with the head of the our Audio & Visual suite about what equipment would be needed and there is nothing complicated. Camera, tripod, three ARRI lights and possibly a green screen.

VFX Film Test - Creating a Wisp

After my research with wisps and good idea already in my head of how I want them to look. I'm now going to go in to After Effects and attempt to create one. This may not be the finished product but it will probably be pretty close to what I will use in the end, I decided to use the "CC Particle World" simulator. Which emitted particles a simply, next I needed to put make them 3D and have the ability to move in around x, y and z. To do this I had to use a few expressions that link them all up.

At this point I had a fully animating particle emitter that I could move around in full 3D space. To test this I quickly added in the expressions "wiggle(.5,100)" which aloud to the null object (that my particle is connected to) to move randomly when scurbbing my timeline.

So now I had a particle that was leaving a trail, I needed to give it some colour and some glow. Using the effects 'Hue/Saturation' & 'Glow' on an adjustment layer, I created that something start to loosely resemble my image. I went back to the particle emitter and played around with a few more settings till my particle was a little more streamline than before.

I then started to realise that the faster my particles went, the more of them I needed to product but then the sections where the particle trail overlapped glowed to intensely for my liking. I decided I needed a plugin a little more reliable and since I have the full Red Giant Suit I was able to take advantage of the Trapcode Particular.

This was good but still not quite what I wanted. I went back to particular, as you can see from the first image alot of the extra facts give the trail it's thickness. Each image below goes through the options I attached to the effects: Particular 2, Colorama, Hue/Saturation, Glow, CC Vector Blur, Fast Blur and Optical Flare. I'm sure there were other ways I could of achieved this effect but this is how I came up with it.

I then gave my wisp a different path, which I have been implementing into my intro sequence. I only made the layers of the wisp visible and rendered them out so I could see what it would look like. The only next option I guess would be to have it with some other footage to see how the light reacts against it. You can see my final rendered below.

VFX Test - Set Extension

Since I wasn't using the 'Set Extension' technique in any of my vfx film. I thought I should still demonstrate that I can perform it in some way or another. I wanted to make sure I did a professional way so I used the tutorial created by 'Video CoPilot', it takes you through the simple steps in order to create a desert scene which includes barren castles and an altered sky. This is the process I took, there is no roto-scoping in this tutorial either as it is quite old.

Tracking Section

First off I imported my desert footage, and created two empty nulls named "First" & "Second". At first I wasn't sure why they did this but after a few minutes I realised. On my first null I went from the first frame and tracked until my lower tracker point was about to fall off the view, I stopped my tracker and applied the motion to the "First" null; that now held the tracking information.

At this point I then shifted my CTI (Current Time Indicator) to the very last frame of my "First" track. Selected two new locations and continued to track until the end of eight second file. Once I was happy with the second track, I used the pick whippet tool to parent my "First" track to my "Second" track; simply the separate tracking information would now play into one another seamlessly. We have done this because our video panned to high up for a normal 2d track motion to follow. I could of used Mocha quite easily and got the whole track, but this is about using the raw software you have.

Matte Painting Section

So now I have a fully tracked video with all the needed information. I need to take my barren castle and add it in to footage. I went to one of the final frames and took a snap and saved it out as a PSD. I then went to Photoshop to create my matte painting. Nothing special, a little resize, some curves, hue and saturation, erasing here and there, duplicate and change a few times and match all the perspectives up. In about ten minutes I had some kind of simple landscape that looked believable.

Back Into After Effects Section

Once I was happy with the final picture, I could simply save the PSD and import that into After Effects. It has a great option that lets you pull out just one layer as I only needed my castles to go over the top. I moved my CTI to the frame at which I took a snap of the scene and placed in my castles. Again taking the pick whippet tool I parented to the "First" (Which also have the "Second" null information) null to my castles. Upon quick inspection they seemed to work perfect. We also placed some hi resolution clouds on in the sky to make it a little more dynamic, I just had to add a simple mask to the left and bottom of the image and feather them out so they would blend nicely with the original sky, a slight opacity adjustment and once pick whippet to the "First" null so it would move with it and we were good to go.

Finishing Touches and Render

Once I was happy with everything, I pre-composed the footage so I could then go ahead and add an adjustment layer to give the colouring style I wanted. As this was to demonstrate the 'set extension' technique I just pulled in Red Giant 'Looks' & 'Mojo' to quickly get that blockbuster effect.

For quick demonstration in a final render, I just hid each layer and added the composition to the render list, made one visible and so on till I got to my final look. After stitching them together I rendered it out one last time for my final video that shows each element being added to the shot, check it out below.

VFX Research - Matte Painting

In a previous post looking at the film 'Mary Poppins' I briefly spoke about a technique that I was to research a little more because it was highly popular at the height of it's creation, it opened a whole new world for film makes to work with. Here is Google's definition.

A matte painting is a painted representation of a landscape, set, or distant location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that is nonexistent in real life or would otherwise be too expensive or impossible to build or visit

Below a shot from Pirates of the Caribbean, I had no idea that films this recent were still using matte paintings. It just goes to show how effective and inexpensive they still are today/

Back when they were first used sometimes it was a little obvious they, I think to us now, at the present time see it more obviously because we're use to a higher quality visual. Though back in the day I am quite confident people wouldn't have known the difference or even if they did would have enjoyed it just as much.

The point of the technique is that it's should be almost invisible to the viewer, they shouldn't notice it. An illusion of non-existent environment around our area of focus.

As far as history goes, the first ever matter painting was in 1907 by Noman Dawn. He was painting on glass for a movie called Mission of California, I can't imagine the excitement of them using the finished pieced and seeing the incredible effect back then. I'm sure it was no where near perfect but did a brilliant job. The technique is clearly used so much that the majority of the populous are oblivious to it, which is precisely what it's meant to do. Well known movies that heavily used this effect goes from as early as 'The Wizard of Oz', 'Mary Poppins', Star Wars IV and one probably the most used scenes for demonstration Raider's of the Lost Ark in 1981 the famous painting of the warehouse as pictured below.

As technology progressed of course, traditional matte painting is not as popular as it was; more commonly digital compositing is used but that's not to say some wise experts can't still use them to save money on their budget. With a bit of research I was able to learn the Die Hard 2 was one of the first merge matte painting and digital composting together, specifically the final scene on the runway of the airport. Unless you really need to save money, there are plenty of other options can give you much more flexibility in your film, 3d environments are pretty much the way to go in 2014. I would love to see a new film re-use the old glass matte painting effect though, even if it's just for one scene.

I am quite sure I won't need this technique for my video, again it would be something I would only experiment with. I remember seeing a video that I have forgot the name of, where instead of paying to fix up the whole house, they just used a matte painting to cover and make it look perfectly fine (Since half way through the film it goes through a renovation). Again my video is too simple to use one, there aren't enough elements and they just don't require a matte painting to represent anything.

VFX Research - Chroma Key

A technique we are obviously going to be expected to researched is one of the most widely used since it's creation back in the 1930's and soon the be challenged the by its alter version in the 1950's. Used in pretty much every scenario that you would like to place someone in a virtual world, green or blue screens techincal term is actually Chroma Key.

"A digital technique by which a block of a particular colour (often blue or green) in a film or video image can be replaced by another colour or image, enabling, for example, a weather forecaster to appear against a background of a computer-generated weather map."

As mentioned in the definition, the technique allows you to render your block colour "(often blue or green)" invisible for the most part. Why though was it first invented green, and then also blue? Simple because bright green is not a commonly worn colour, anywhere. They are also specific shades that really don't clash with much else, skin has red tones all over the it they would disappear instantly with a red background; the same with hair especially lighter shades. Blue came into use because they found that it gave finer and less jagged when filming with actual film strips but as digital came to be green become most common again. The best part is you can pick rolls of this stuff up to cover plenty of space for less than £20 in most cases, it's so affordable.

Before going forward let's make sure we have the origins and developments correct, before digital compositing there was a technique known as 'Travelling Matte'.

"a film containing silhouettes of subjects or figures used to mask off selected areas during printing of motion-picture film."

This is typically how films incorporated the technique into film, but the process was incredibly time consuming which cried out for change. As mentioned above Green Screen first appeared in the 1930's and blue around the 1950's, simply to create basic and interesting backgrounds. In present day there aren't many high class films that won't use chroma key, only your lower budget or specific style films will get away with not using one but good luck to them.

With my new idea, I personally don't think I'm going to need to chrome key my subject. Being in a simple empty space she doesn't need to be seen anywhere, it isn't the location I am focusing on. Still it pays well to know the history and more of the inner workings of chroma key for future projects. I am still constantly searching for better plugins that enable me to work around chrome key, lately I have found that the Red Giant Suite has incredible software that makes the technique almost effortless; in the end that's what people want.

VFX Artist - John Knoll

My guess was that most people were going to research Joe Letteri (Who has worked on LoTR along with The Hobbit) So I decided to do two different artists who had done older movies that I was very fond of as I was younger and growing up. Along with Janek Sirrs, John Knoll are my favourites. Unlike Janek there is a lot more information on John as some of his features are little more well known. I've pretty much seen every film that he has worked out give or take a few. Born ins 1962, a widely known and established visual effects artist and Check Creative Officer at Industrial Light and Magic (Now you know right?). Another fun fact that I DID know being a huge techy, is that he is the co-founder (Along with his brother Thomas Knoll) of the now Adobe owned Photoshop. Something I didn't click on at first but have now is that he also the creator of 'Knoll Light Factory' built into the Red Giant Suite, a brilliant lens flare plugin that I have personally used many times.

In his early days he was given some great chances to work on titles like Empire of the Sun and of course some of the older Star Trek Films! He worked as a 'Motion Control Camera Operator' mostly until he eventually took flight to higher work. As his career progressed we saw him working on bigger films, what I love about him is I found out that he did many collaborations with other visual effect artists; this is awesome because they're really stretching each other limits and combining ideas to come up with the best solutions, a great work ethic.

In the 90's he finally became a visual effects supervisor taking films like Mission Impossible and Star Wars Episode 1 at the end of the decade (Which isn't surprising since he worked most of the other Star Wars movies even Star Wars IV in 1977.). Basically by the time we had reached the new millennium he would go on to work on pretty much every big film produced. Star Wars, Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, Pacific Rim and a favourite of mine Deep Blue Sea.

A movie he largely worked on was Pirates of the Carribean (all three). By the time we had reached the second and third the amount of CG was massive, he would of definitely had his work cut out for him. Again with Avatar seeing some of the VFX breakdowns of this movie make my head spin, to be able to supervise project like this you need to be very versatile and have an integral mind. His most recent work is of Pacific Rim, which reading that it took somewhere between 80 - 90 hours per frame, yes frame to render out is crazy. It just goes to show that if you're passionate about your trade you work hard you can be working for 50 years and more, this guy is almost legend.

VFX Artist - Janek Sirrs

Purely because I love the film Dante's Peak (not even that sure why), I knew obviously the lava couldn't been totally real if at all. So I found out who was responsible for the majority of them and then appear Janek Sirrs. The best films are the ones that have VFX but you don't even realise them, you thought they were just real or they were so good that you didn't question them. Obviously it wasn't Janek himself who made these but he was supervisor of a large team who put the effects together, he drove it.

Instead of trying to research about Janek Sirrs himself, it's better to just look at some of the bigger films him and his team have had a hand in creating (which you'll be surprised). Let's start with older works, he starts from the late 80's to present. His major work has really been in the past ten years but that doesn't mean he has had gems in the past. As I mentioned earlier Dante's Peak (some of that lava was CGI!), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Braveheart (Personal Favourite) and funnily enough The Matrix Trilogy! There must be a trait in Janek that I find aesthetically pleasing!

As I mentioned above, his fame has came in the passed 10 years really. Branching from blockbuster films such as Batman: Begins and Iron Man 2 and almost most recently the Avengers. If someone of the videos I have seen are of him and his teams VFX work then no wonder he has been getting requests to do films such as this. Iron Man 2 is heavily CG of course, Batman: Begins not so much. As much as his latest supervised work is fantastic it seems to have moulder in to every other vfx companies style, because that's just how you do it now. I prefer his old work, less frequent it may be but it was almost magical to the point that you didn't question if half of it was even real. Don't get me wrong I could watch Batman: Begins and The Avengers over and over but sometimes it's nice to watch films that look natural and not heavily built from CG. Overall an incredible artist who surprisingly created many iconic scenes we take for granted now days.