Ancillary Production - More panels

Left inside panel.

Centre inside panel with disc. (There would be a plastic holder here; this image is to show off the design side of things).

The left inside panel is meant to be the simple artwork-only panel (technically there will be more of these but this is the first one I've finished!). Not really much to say here other than that it features the reappearance of Dark Flame's signature Black Knight guitar, and some wonderfully edgy grunge-type brush textures going on (by the power of Overlay blending!). 

As for the disc panel, it uses the close-up of the fretboard from my post yesterday; I figured it wasn't really worth using anything too flashy as it was going to be covered up by the disc. The disc art itself is one of the guitar stills with my face blended in. As the disc art isn't going to have much impact in terms of marketing, I thought my priority should be making it look cool; which I think I achieved in terms of the main visuals. The legal text not so much - I wanted it to curve with the disc so it didn't take up much space, but me and pathing aren't particularly good friends. Eh, it's kinda in place I guess.

-HM.

Production Update 3 - Electric Soldier Guitar

A day earlier than promised! Huzzah.

In this video, I decide how I'm going to go about filming with the strobe light, and then have a go at testing the editing effect I wish to use in the final piece.

The idea behind the shots in that test at the end is that the guitar on the stand is a placeholder for me. I couldn't be in this as I was in charge of the camera and the torch - when I film the final thing, I'll have someone else covering those duties.

From this I've established a few things -

• The qtxlight strobe light seems to be the most practical to use when filming the video; so I will use that when recording my main performance.
• The rapid cuts to the strobe shot actually work well! This is something I'm really glad about; it creates the 'detached' feeling I've been aiming for since my original concept.
• The contrast between static and moving shots work well - the regular shots are static (well, as static as they can be when I'm holding the camera without a tripod whilst also moving around a torch...) whilst the strobe shots have a degree of movement to them. In the final piece, I will use a combination of pan and zoom shots - more variety will re-emphasise the detached concept.
• The torch also works well! I wasn't expecting this; I just used it for the test due to a lack of better lighting. I could use the torch to create a similar effect to what I was originally going to use the chroma-keyed backgrounds for - to show the light floating around, representing the clash between hero and dark in the performer's mind.

-HM.

Green Screen Experimentation

So, I plan on using the green screen for the performance element of my I Am... All of Me video. This is because I intend to make use a background which using some creative lighting effects to represent the confusing of the character as they try to choose whether to take the pathway towards being a brave-hearted hero or the pathway towards black-hearted evil.

Before I can start planning which shots I should use for the storyboarding phase of production, I need to know what is technically possible with the green screen in school. Because of this I thought it'd be a good idea to film some test shots from different angles to see what works well post-editing. There possibly are some obstacles I'll face as the green screen in school is very small - however this is a challenge one must face when they don't own a film studio.

Therefore, here is nearly two minutes of me acting like an idiot in front of said green screen (with backgrounds I happen to have saved on my computer - don't ask):

Many thanks to Mr. N. for sticking around after school to act as cameraman!

What worked well here then?

Static shots (where the camera stays in the same place) seem to work fairly well, though there are still some green reflections over my body. I'm guessing this is down to the lighting in the room at the time, but I may have to experiment more to pin down the exact cause.

As for what is in the shot itself, the first three shots show that I can get away with -some- movement myself, with only minor chroma keyer glitches showing through (usually near my hair and fingers). I did have problems with shots where I moved a lot though - there was one shot we attempted which featured me walking from outside of the shot straight past the camera, however this ended up being completely unusable when I tried editing it in iMovie. Because of this it will be necessary to keep the movement limited during the performance scenes.

Shots where the camera moves are a different story though; as we can see in the shot at 0:40 where Sir tried rotating the camera, the chroma keyer software struggles to keep up with it (resulting in some unwanted background and some moments where it clips through my jacket), which seems to be down to the way the visible lighting appears to change as the camera moves. This is also apparent in a later shot where Sir tries to pan the camera past me.

The very close up shot doesn't work on the basis that the software struggles to cope with the extra detail of my hair against the background, which makes the cut look like a bad magic wand job.

Because of this I should avoid using unnecessary very/extreme close ups during the green screen parts of my video - some will be necessary (Goodwin's conventions; plugging star image etc.) but I don't want to overkill it because I'd hate for my artist to be associated with terrible visual effects. I also still need to sort my eyes out, as we can see in the screenshot above.

Getting the chroma key to work in iMovie was a tad fiddly; most of the shots didn't want to work off the bat, so I had to reduce the Green Gain in the Inspector until it looked right. There was no formula for each shot, I just had to tinker until they worked. This could be annoying.

-HM.

Eye 2.0

Ahoy mateys,

As mentioned in the last post, the original take of the eye close-up was too unstable to use, so I've had to rerecord it. I found this Joby adjustable tripod thing I have laying around, and arranged the most professional camera setup you've ever seen in your life:

(Yes, I took a snapshot of a camera. THAT MIGHT CAUSE A PARADOX OF SOME KIND.)

Reasoning behind this mess of a setup:

• 3DS box to raise the camera to a reasonable height, so I don't have to damage my neck to catch the eye.
• Tripod to avoid shaky cam, as previously mentioned.
• Computer to playback the original clip, as reference for when to blink etc.
• Plectrum wallet, broken mobile phone and loose change because I don't have enough pride to clear up to take a snapshot. 

So, what does it look like now? Compare the first version (up first) to the second version (1:19) - 

There are still some problems - there's still some unwanted movement, though this is down to my head rather than the camera (it's nearly impossible to keep my head still for a minute straight) and I do blink out of place at times (this is a problem with my eyes in general - they're more sensitive to light than they should be, to a point where every optician I've ever seen has had difficulties examining them as they close whenever they use their little torch thing...). I don't think that's too big of an issue though; in the original clip it looks like the eye movements were improvised to meet the comfort of the person in the shot, so if they rerecorded another take of it, it would probably have looked different.

Comfort, however, is not something I could describe the filming process as; the version in the video is probably the fifth/sixth take of this I did before I got something even close to usable as everything else was slightly out of frame - this means moving my eye somewhat in sync over and over and over and over and over etc.. I now have a headache. Fun.

I did find out a way of avoiding the out of frame issue after a while, though - remember how last year I made numerous jokes about how I like Apple products because they're shiny? Turns out the shininess has a practical use. In MPEG Streamclip, the viewer is black before the video is playing; I was able to see the reflection of the screen on the camera in this black box, which made it easier to line my eye up, before tapping space to start the playback.

-HM.