From the course: Creating a Short Film: 09 VFX Environments

Creating a plan and shooting the footage

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 09 VFX Environments

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Creating a plan and shooting the footage

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- [Instructor] Alright folks I'm excited about this chapter because it represents kind of a shift in this training course. So we been talking about all these different concepts and precepts and principles and stuff like that. And now we're going to start you know applying all that stuff that we've learnt so far to create bigger visual effect shots. So the first one we're going to look at in this chapter is this aerial shot here. Now, almost to the point where we're getting picture locked so not quite picture locked but almost there as I was going through the edit I was kind a feeling like we where really missing shots were we see Cordelia dwarfed by a big environment when I was taking Nadi out to these different places and getting this footage I really wanted us to stay connected to her so I didn't get as faraway from her as, you know, maybe they could have been so the shots weren't as wide, maybe you know they weren't as epic as they could have been. Yeah, one of the things that the Assurance taught me was that getting epic looking footage is surprisingly challenging. It's really about the focal length of the lens that you choose. If you have a subject where you put them in the frame and all of that. I went to really epic locations and sometimes I don't feel like the footage I got was as epic as the location actually was. So I reached out to Heller who was a team member on the Assurance, who's done some great stuff with the project and he was really getting into aerial photography, aerial footage. So he had drones and stuff like that and he gave me some footage to look through that he was kind of fiddling around with and one of the shots had the drone was coming back to the earth at the end and it was like this really wide awesome shot and as the camera was coming back to him at the end of the shot it looked like a push in and I was like man, this looks really really awesome. So I decided to put Cordelia, you know, maybe sitting at the camp fire like she's kind of living on her own. And I would do something to draw attention to her but that way we could make her really small and the world really big. So I decided to make a camp fire and put her in it. So then my next challenge was okay, well how do I shoot footage of Nadi where it looks like, you know I'm, from the sky, like I don't, you know I don't know how to do that how do I get my red scarlet way up in the sky and shoot down on her. Well then I realized that I have a deck in my backyard so I put Nadi down on the ground I put like a tarp down because it was wet. I had to wait for it to be like a cloudy day so that the footage matched so the lighting would be even and so then it was wet so I had to put down a big tarp then I put down my green screen on top of the tarp and put Nadi down on that and I shot over my deck down onto Nadi. I also had her,as I put on my director hat, and I had her move around a little bit more in discomfort, probably a little bit more than she normally would have. Like one of the things you learn when you're directing actors, we talked about this a little bit in the directing course but you know, when someones really really close to the camera they could be super, super subtle because the camera picks up everything, but the farther away you get from the camera, the more you have to emote before its really, comes across. And because we were going to be shrinking this down really tiny, I needed her to wiggle a little bit so that it didn't look just like a still photo and we could also kind of get that she's uncomfortable and really cold. So as I was looking at this footage I realized, okay , I have Nadi I have all the elements green screened as well what else do I have to do to this clip? So my plan was I have to remove Heller he's standing here in the shot, I got to get rid of him of course. And I also have to make campfire elements. I have to make rocks, and I want to get logs, I don't want to just put all the logs on the fire, because she might be needing them throughout the night so I'm going to assume that she went out and got a bunch of logs, and has those next to the campfire as well. I need to make embers in the fire. I need to make smoke coming out of the campfire. And I also wanted to create some like haze for the sky. And because a lot of these elements are really far away from the camera we can cheat things a little bit like I can do things in Photoshop I don't have to have like a complete CG environment in like Cinema 4D or something like that because I can just kind of get away with cheating because its far away again, so doing that in Photoshop. So my WORKFLOW was ,for all these extra elements, to create some of them in Element 3D and After Effects. Take everything to Photoshop so I could put them together, and again they're not going to animate, like the rocks and logs aren't not going to move over time. So like I could just set that up in Photoshop and then bring it back into After Effects composite it all together,use TrapCode Particular to make the smoke and then we're going to add a color grade at the end to change the time of day. So that's the to do list for this shot. Lets jump into it piece by piece and see what we got.

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