I’m now getting to the stage where I have only 3 scenes left to composite. Having said that, I will, time permitting, redo a few of them to clean up the odd issue. Most of them could probably do with a re-render depending on the issues each of them have. Clearly, though, time is a major issue and I need to draw the line under what I think is acceptable and what I think I can improve on in a very short space of time. Our final films will be shown at the DCA – so it will be great to see them on the big screen, but the downside is that any minor faults will be amplified somewhat! So, I need to do my best obviously!
This also week sees ‘Concerning dragons’ on the BIG screen in City Square, so that should be fun.
Godrays and Lightwrap
Last week I forgot to throw in a picture of lightwrap in operation so here we are (this is the end of someone’s foot!):
The idea is that you can take the light from the background B and apply it to the foreground A. It can be blurred etc, and it depends on the intensity and how diffuse you make it. Good for covering up roto problems and placing in roto’d people into the scene more convincingly.
Godrays is a node that allows the colour of your scene/node to be splayed outward depending on where your place the centre point and transform point. It’s easy to get carried away with this one, so I’ve done my best to be subtle about it and enhance the glyphs by first rendering out a separate pass with just them, and applying it over the original ones to give it a slight blur but also the impression of bursting out from the source:
Editing in Adobe Premiere
I had done a rough edit before semester 3 with the storyboards, then replaced that with a version using the footage without VFX. So, now I have been replacing the shots as they come in to see how it’s shaping up and what needs to be done. All seems to be going well apart from an unknown issue that keeps crashing the program, when I try and render out the scenes as they are. At the moment I’m tryng to suss out what the problem is. I’m going to try and render out each scene as a separate movie clip, maybe a png or something, and try again. To be continued…
…The ‘png’ file conversion seems to be working, as I converted all the tif sequences into mov’s with a png codec, and Premiere seems to be running more smoothly. I can only assume that it can’t handle too many tif sequences at once.
Tidying Up
All of the scenes have been rendered out, and I’ve put a rough edit together to see how it runs. It looks pretty good, although it’s hard to see it with fresh eyes as I’ve been focussed on the minutae for so long. Some of the scenes have a few little problems like: some glyph transforms needs put right as they run off too quickly; a few additional roto masks to brighten up the church roof or tone down the light coming in the windows; the fake flash lighting in one shot needs the roto sorted out. Anyway, small issues really. I don’t think at this stage any major changes can or will be forthcoming.
Titles and Credits
I have begun creating initial ideas for the title sequence – so far, I’m using an extended version of the scene where I’m writing the musical notation but this time with the text ‘Holographic Music: An Interpretation of Cymatics’ as the title. I have created 3 versions – one red, green and blue – which slip over the other to create a kind of chromatic abberation, till a little godrays and animation has the text fly out and fade subtly. I don’t want anything too flashy, as I’d like the film to start simply and build to a crescendo of sorts at the end. For the credits, I plan to use some cymatic images over a black background with an extended simple melody that will accompany the glyphs. (Images to follow)
J.J. McGowan 