Horror Cinema

Penner, J (2008). Horror Cinema. Koln: Taschen. 

This book which I took out of the library, thought it has dated films, I used it as a starting point for looking at horror films or even making a horror themed video.

I briefly read the introduction and also read the chapter: Ghosts & Haunted Houses & Possessions, Demons & Tricksters. 

The chapter Ghosts & Haunted Houses discusses how different movies have portrayed this theme, some movies have the ghosts haunting many sites while some houses aren't actually being haunted by a paranormal being but being haunted psychologically.
I watched movies like 'The Shining', 'Sinister' and 'Doppelganger' to get a sense of the different ways that horror movies are edited and visually expressed.

I learnt that it depends on the what exactly is causing the 'terror' in the story and work from there on thinking about how to show it to the audience.
Sound plays a big part because if the paranormal being is scary visually but no sound comes with it to set the mood then it is not effective and the audience won't believe it to exist or think about it existing.

In general, the movies discussed in this chapter book such as Don't Look Now and Lady in White, made sure that visually the characters were believable so when I portray Meg as a ghost, I need to think about how she will look from the outfit to the makeup, whether to go over the top or add in extra effects in After Effects.

Superimposition with a mask

Experimentation with Superimposition with mask from Munirat Plummer on Vimeo.


This video above shows me experimenting with my idea. It is a rough experiment because there many mistakes such as:

• accuracy of masking in After Effects
• the scene is not even in the videos, so in the future I need to make that I keep any item in the scene in the same place if I'm going to try and mask any element in it.
• the opacity effect does give me the result I want but I want to experiment with ways of making the person more ghostlike, maybe I can add a floating effect or mistiness. This would require me to use Maya so I think I might re-do the scene and practice the masking technique and combine the use of incorporating CGI mist into it.
• I should also think of sound, I have not added sound to the video because I am not experimenting with that yet, but now that I have a visual aid I can start to experiment with that more.
• I should think about how what direction I want the character coming in from and how it is going to interact with the ghost.

The rough storyboard just shows how I want the scene to look, I am going re-do the storyboard and try to show the ghostly effects I want to add, I can do that in my concept art too.

I learned that I can also keyframe the mask applied in After Effects so this means I can be more accurate with the technique. Images below are examples, the mask outline can be manually created or based on an existing shape.

VFX Shoot: increasing production value

Today we spent half the day shooting and learning how to set up a crane lift and dolly tracking equipment. I go through what I briefly made notes on in the post about setting up this type of equipment.


The equipment we took out were:

• tripod
• Canon 5DSLR camera
• indie dolly tracking
• velcro strap for dolly
• chalk stands for dolly
• dolly wheels
• dolly seat
• LCD monitor
• SCART cables
• Boom mic/stand
• sound recorder
• camera crane
• camera crane lift

There is probably some that I have missed out but the list does not include light equipment which would have meant a lot more equipment to keep track of and it shows you that you need an extra hand to help set up this equipment.

CAMERA CRANE SET UP

Set up wheels first, then a tripod goes on top with the two pointy pins going in the wheel slot.
When applying the crane if there are arrow stickers present as indicators, they should meet (arrow to arrow) or any other form of indicators is a good thing to look for so it helps your intuition when setting up.

 If using the crane, connect the camera to a monitor so the director or camera man can see what the scene looks like, the same applies to a dolly track.

As shown below, the crane has weight handles that allow the user to control the crane in horizontal and vertical directions. 

DOLLY TRACKING

Velcro straps to the dolly helps to keep it in place and make sure that when the camera runs across it that it does not come apart.

Little chalk stands go under the dolly poles to keep it in place. These are safety measures that should be checked so a two or more people are given the role of making sure the dolly track is set up right.

The images show different angles and parts that make up a dolly tracking equipment. The camera can travel down and this gives the illusion of zooming in on a scene. This technique can help to draw in the viewer instead of bringing the scene to the viewer, the viewer feels like they are brought into the scene, therefore enhancing the storyline.

The image above shows that black straps have been placed to keep the dolly track together while the camera tripod travels down it. Just a little information to add, a small fact to overlook.

At the end of the day, I learnt that there are many roles on a film set and a person could be in charge of holding cables or making sure the dolly track is in the right place and does not cause any complications while filming and that the set up time of a set/scene needs to be considered. A scene could only be 10 seconds long but to set up the scene to get the shot could have taken 15 minutes with the right number of crew members, this is where working in a group benefits your time management skills and work ethic.

Transmedia Storytelling

Transmedia: is a method of telling stories across multiple platforms, this has evolved through advances in technology, high tech mobile devices.

The term was created by the Professor Marsha Kinder during the year 1991.
These are examples of transmedia that has been transferred across all these platforms:

• Matrix http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

• Lord of the Rings  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120737/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Worldbuilding is where the transmedia elements have been put into multiple channels that can be used to draw in more hype over the product and make the story more interesting based on characters from the film, game or movie.
Technology has changed the way we watch and experience entertainment, TV shows can be now uploaded to websites and viewed in countries that it is not available in, this can be an indicator of how well the show is doing and how the audience is reacting to it.

For me, this means that if I came up with an idea for a film or animation, I should also think about other ways of transferring it to multiple platforms. This would help me if I needed to pitch an idea to a company because I am giving my idea more foundation and substance.

Networking

In PPP2 we are talking about Networking and how to get out there to improve experience and jump-start your career.

Why
Informs the portfolio, this is part of experience and it helps add contacts to your list.
Getting more contacts could mean more commision or joining company crews,  contacts can also give you feedback/critique which is known as continual professional development helps you get noticed and improves your practice because you know where to improve on.

Going to festivals and conferences are a great way to keep in the loop of how your practice is growing in the industry and what is needed to stay in it, you get to meet from many other top practitioners in the industry which is a good time to hand out business cards and make contact with these people.


Work/Job: live briefs, internships, competition

How
Social:
Nepotism: getting a job or work through family, relatives or friends
can be considered to be favouritism but can help your career field

Opportunities for networking

http://courses.creativeskillset.org/pick_the_tick_degree_courses/student_showcase : good for seeing other student's work to network and collaborate if possible.

http://www.lcm.ac.uk/ : a good way to add to your skills if you're a film maker, animator or games designer because collaborating with someone else to do your sound for you could make your work much better and enhance your reputation.
http://www.11secondclub.com/ : good way to get your work seen regularly and hopefully getting feedback


Local: 
Festivals/conferences
Bradford Animation festival
Bournemouth VFX festival
VFX festival in London
http://www.leedsfilm.com/ : i have listed it twice in the international and local category because it draws many films from different countries and are screened in Leeds which for now is local to me but not others.

National:

Bournemouth VFX festival

VFX festival in London

International: 
Blogger from Google
Vimeo: www.vimeo.com
Tumblr: www.tumblr.com
http://www.deviantart.com/
http://www.shortoftheweek.com/
http://www.3dartistonline.com/
http://www.empireonline.com/
http://www.fmx.de/
http://www.imagineanimation.net/
https://www.raindance.org/
http://www.leedsfilm.com/
http://uk.linkedin.com/ : good for getting your CV out there and linking with other professionals in your feed and a good way to get jobs

After Effects induction- part 3

In today's lesson we learnt about more advanced keyframing techniques.

We discussed spatial interpolation, acceleration and deceleration.

Graph editor in After Effects you can use

Graph Editor options

In the video there is evidence of spatial interpolation, acceleration and deceleration.

We used some animation techniques under the Animation menu, called keyframe assistant.

As you can see the orange square eases into it speed and meets the other squares at the end, while the green square starts off at a decelerating rate before speeding up to meet the other squares at the end. The red square accelerates quickly unlike the other squares, this shows different effects that you can add to give a realistic illusion.

Keyframe Interpolation from Munirat Plummer on Vimeo.



Ball Rolling Experiment from Munirat Plummer on Vimeo.
This ball rolling downhill experiment is without the vector graph from Illustrator.

Screenshot of how we transferred a vector path from Illustrator to After Effects and After Effects transforms it into a motion path. This is a very useful tool to be able to transfer work between these softwares.

Jerad S Marantz/Alex Mandra

 

 

http://jeradsmarantz.blogspot.co.uk/


I am posting work from Jerad S Marantz because he worked on the 2013 film, The Conjuring. It is a film based on paranormal investigators helping a family rid of terrorizing ghostly presence in their house.


The genre is horror and thriller which got me thinking about what category my video is going to be and how that would affect my storyboarding and concept art work. I am sure that I shall be exploring idea 2 more which I explained in my previous post so considering that I will need to know if I want to make the visual appearance of the doppelgänger scary or a calm presence. This will also affect my choice of music.

Or I could go down the path of sci-fi which would mean I would want the doppelgänger to be less scary and more human but with super powers.
Which is what Alex Mandra has done.

Alex Mandra has also done some thriller type work for the Black Swan movie, which I have posted an example of below.
http://alexmandra.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/black-swan_04.html

VFX Festival, London

I came across this festival from the 3d Artist online website (http://www.3dartistonline.com/).

There was an article http://www.3dartistonline.com/news/2013/10/the-vfx-festival-2013-the-panel-debate/,  it discusses the debate that will be taking part throughout the festival with guests from big VFX companies such as The Mill, Cinesite and Framestore.

I thought since I may not be able to attend, others who are interested can and there is going to be a talk about what industry companies are looking for in their VFX artists.

This will be an informative talk that I would love to attend if finance was not a problem, however, I shall look into it for next year.
I have also learnt of the company The Mill which I did not know about.

This festival is mainly about besides the exclusive screenings and workshops,  helping the VFX industry grow and make sure practitioners are aware of what skills they need.

Identity

Today's context of practice lecture was on IDENTITY. I am going to briefly state different points and facts made in the lecture, it was very interesting to see how theories from previous philosophers has contributed to how various people think and act today based on how they perceive themselves and others identities.
In the lecture, we discussed many different topics, one being about :

PHYSIOGNOMY
this is judging or stereotyping a person's face based on their features and using that as indicators to analyse their character or intellect.
This led to allowing racism to play a big part in basing different people on their features.
Phrenology is a part of physiognomy.
Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, who tried to create a link between people's facial features and their criminal past, creating the notion that criminal tendencies can be inherited and certain races such as blue eyed and blonde haired humans carried more intelligence than other races.

We also discussed about phases of identity:

pre modern identity: states that personal identity is stable

modern identity: has the trickle down theory consisting of emulation and distinction. Emulation being that some people in the lower class of society wished to mimic/look like those in the higher class and started creating knock off outfits of their attire and thus making the higher class people create a more distinctive look and ever changing fashion so that there is always something more expensive that is not easily affordable by the lower classes.

post modern identity: can be related to the work of Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, where he uses a discourse analysis with different categories used to define how people make up their own identity in this post-modernism society. A few of this categories are race, class, gender, sexual orientation, education.

Good vs Evil: Possession

So far, I have many different paths I want to take the idea of being possessed by a doppelgänger or spiritual being.
Idea 1:
It is about a couple, where the woman is possessed by her evil  doppelgänger once a month and torments them through the night. The story ends with the boyfriend getting rid of his girlfriend instead of the doppelgänger.

Idea 2:
A film about what it could look like if a doppelgänger was present in the real world, for example, what sounds or mood will it bring? Would it speak, or just be present? How would the human feel confronted with their doppelgänger  These are the questions that I would like to answer. I feel I could have more fun with this idea because the storyline is simply showing what happens when the doppelgänger appears.

For now, I shall keep on researching and choose an idea and start storyboarding it. I am going to experiment with cloth simulation in video and Maya so I can understand how I want this phantom creature to act.

Below is a story about an occurrence of a doppelgänger in a school.

http://www.historiesmysteriesandstrangeness.com/2013/08/the-doppelganger-of-emilie-sagee.html

http://listverse.com/2013/08/30/10-disturbing-tales-of-doppelgangers/

Making of Game of Thrones VFX breakdown

Making of Game Of Thrones VFX by Pixomondo by itsartmag

screenshot from video

I have posted the VFX breakdown video from Game Of Thrones. I love this TV show and finding out a lot of scenes they shoot are in CG (computer generated) makes it even better because it is not visible to the naked eye. 

For example, castles in the background are mainly CG but the layering effects help blend it into the scene very well.

The ship that they sail as seen in the image above, is also CG and it has been 3D modelled very well, this motivates me to improve my 3D modelling and look at blending effects that can be used in Maya and After Effects.

When there are scenes that require a mass of people such as the army Khalessi marches with, most of the people were CG which means that they used the rule of 50/50%, which is 50% CG and 50% live-action that way neither over powers the other and it results in the scene not looking fake. I can use this method when I want to make a crowd bigger and do not have the means of casting huge numbers of people to be in a scene, I can use visual effects to create this illusion of a mass of people in one area.


I found this information through the website of Sven Sauer.

http://www.mattepainting-studio.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=9

He is a Matte Painting Artist, born in Germany and has worked on Game of Thrones, Season 3. He has also worked on other German/Hollywood films.

Sound Editing in Adobe Premiere

We did a more in depth sound workshop using Adobe Premiere, here I have outlined some controls that can be used and techniques outlined. This is a brief explanation of the workshop but as I implement these techniques in my practice I shall be able to demonstrate the methods I used in more detail.

The circled button allows you to choose between only importing your video or audio into timeline. This allows more control with your editing process.

To create a calibration of your sound you can generate a 'Bar & Tone''  which allows you to know  what decibel it is.
Remember to calibrate your sound and video either in camera or in post production.

The circle area in the image is where you can check the sound level and also calibrate to that value.

Editing the sound clip speed can help create a new sound which could help add to the context of the video such as making the sound very deep. This is all part of experimenting with a type of sound but creating different levels of it to produce a desired effect.

After Effects Induction- 2nd

Photoshop has a 'film and video' setting which allows you to choose a preset which makes the workflow between Adobe softwares easier and error free.

FILM & VIDEO FORMATS

NTSC
PAL DV
HD
HDTV

To have a transparency layer in After Effects we should always save the image as photoshop. format.

We learnt more key-framing and layering techniques in After Effects and in the video below you can see a simple example of this that I exported.


After Effects Layer Experimenting from Munirat Plummer on Vimeo.

This is the result of choosing the option of composition layers instead of footage in the import settings window in After Effects.

Adding Text background with animation

Animate the background layer and then add a text layer above and when you add the alpha matte mode it creates the look in the image at the bottom.

Same settings in the toggle switch/modes which we used while doing our After Effects & Maya render layers induction. Choosing the Alpha Matte option as seen in the image allows you to create the effect in the image below.

Volunteer Day at No Gloss Film Festival

I volunteered on Saturday, the first of the two day festival, from 10am-4pm.
I arrived there for 9am because there were some last minute set up needed such as computers, tables for display, audience chairs re-aligned and brochures laid out around the venue.

Even though I was put down for the position of usher/technical crew, I was very happy with my role which was to simply press play/pause for the film playlist in one of the screening rooms.
I enjoyed it because I got watch all the films, which were all very different and really good. There were some great ideas that were portrayed very well and if an audience member had a question about the time of a film starting or what I thought of a previous screening, I could answer the question with ease.

It was also very nice to work with the managers, the one in charge of me was Trent, and he was very energetic throughout the day while doing Q&A with some of the directors and artists which was good to have front row seats to watch.
Most of the films screened were indie films and made on a low-budget but they still had good quality production.

One of my favourite screenings that I got to watch while working was 'Above Water', by Jeff Norton. I found the storytelling beautiful, the story is about a banker who lost his finances and wishes to end his life and meets a busker who plays the guitar. These souls would never have met, they learn a lot from each other, the film changes from black and white to colour towards the end, this experimental use of storytelling is what I loved about it and how it was used to express the feelings of the characters towards the end.