For our Final collaborative project so far, I have worked very closely with both the Producerl Louis and the Creative Director; Tony, To try and make a story to be used in a collabritive VFX Project that we would all like.
The first portion of where i came in was at the beginning, we held a class meeting where some classmates would show off their ideas for a project, and while these were all good ideas, when a vote was called we decided to go with Tony’s project. Afterwards we collaboratively worked to create a very rough story of what we wanted, with a light emphasis of the story.
After this, Me, Louis and Tony went about drawing out some rough artboards for all to see in the classroom,
With this we knew about approx which locations we wanted so on our own time Me and the producer, louis went about going to go see the locations in person to get a scale of approx when we should film, how much area we would have, how the VFX Shots would integrate properly etc.
After this, i went about adding on to the original script we had as it needed to be fleshed out more. We had all met again and had a rough detail of each shot, though this needed to be expanded upon. I went about detailing what we would need for each shot, what VFX Elements would be included, and what time of day / colour correction the shot should have.
After this we planned out our days of filming, met on the days and went out for shooting, we had many issues, including small spaces to film in, daylight fading quickly for the shots we wanted, camera batteries dying quicker then anticipated, and other such issues. We used a Blackmagic pocket cinema, plus a gimble for filming shots.
After shooting, i went about creating a rough cut as unfortunately there were no volunteers to do this and we had a deadline approaching. This was a very simple, ungraded sequence i had put together in davinci. A lot of work arounds had to be done in terms of salvaging footage, as some shots were either not filmed properly, were too dark or simply didn’t quite work in what we wanted for the film.
After this progress slowed down on the project, however i organized a meeting for rough cut edits and colour in which Alessia and Louis attended and gave feedback on some feedback for the rough cut, as unfortunately being a director and the editor can very much turn into an echo chamber between yourself. We went about getting the pacing done for each shot, and even used some fusion for a transition on one of the shots. Fusion very much feels similar to Flame to me, and it’s something that while it’s a bit difficult to use, i can see myself using at some point in the future for certain projects.
After this i went about doing a grade for each shot, the original footage of this was set to linear log footage so that we could use LUT’s later on and get a better colour tone, i ran through some issues with using a lot of blue colour temperature scaling as a lot of the footage was very yellow and orange toned and needed to be corrected. Each shot presented it’s own issues, as some shots needed a lot more care then others, however the basic workflow was to add a LUT, use the histogram to make sure nothing is clipping on the footage, and adjust the primaries accordingly. After doing the primaries, i would move on to colour temperature and contrast adjustments, and then if the shot needed more correction i would go into more extremes like desaturating the luminance channels of certain colours or saturating certain rgb values on certain colours.
After this we had our Rough Cut version 2 with a grade.