shot list
Nearing the end of all of my shots, I feel the use of this shot list proved immensely useful, especially in keeping track of renders and render times. This proved especially useful as several shots had to be re-rendered or are currently being re-rendered. One such shot is shot 13, in which there is a slight collision between the floor lamp and the wall. While this adjustment will most likely not be fixed in time for submission, I hope to rectify this discrepancy for my film going forward.
For the final shot of the film, I really wanted to utilise the lighting and time of day to act as metaphorical implications that support the spoken word. The last words of the film are “because if we’ve been through this, there is no way we can’t get through more”. By making the setting a morning Dawn scene, not only does this add more visually interesting implications that the character has been abducted all night is is now returning home by morning, but it also symbolises a new beginning and the end of a period of time (in this instance, lockdown itself). I wanted to end the film in this lighthearted and hopeful way to leave viewers optimistic about the future.
Due to the fact I have spent the past few weeks animating these characters, When approaching this shot, I felt very familiar with what to do and how to clean it up so that the process went a lot quicker. Initially, during the descent from the alien beam, I wanted to make the character flip upside down and fall on the ground. However, I did not have enough frames within the audio to sell that convincingly therefore decided to make the character land quite gracefully with only an impression of the weight returning after the beam had been retracted.
Trying to get a Dawn break look within the lighting of the scene proved to be quite tricky, with the initial sky dome light appearing more like a sunset in its darker, more orange saturation. Looking at references of the morning, I noticed that there is generally more of a “pink” saturation to the sky, with strong orange rim lighting on clouds that reflect from the sun. I feel in order to get the dramatic last shot, I will need to add a strong orange rim lighting effect to make everything blend more effectively in the scene.
As highlighted in the playblast below, I attempted to experiment with how the sun rays would move and affect the lighting; however, going forward, I feel this will be much too complicated due to the fact that animating the mesh lights creates a lot of render times that will prolong my complete the whole film in time for the exhibit.
Since the camera pans back to the sky, I wanted to put the plane that has been frequenting the scenes into the shot once again to make a direct reference to the previous shot’s characters. Below indicates the finalised animation, including camera motions.
Now that all of my shots are animated, I put any remaining shots within the university-associated render farm. While I was initially having issues surrounding the use of it, which was prolonging my rendered content from being completed, in the last week, I got assistance and was able to get it working and ready to go for the heavier shots such as this one.
During the editing process, I explored different effects to try and make apparent the forced recorded nature of the interview and bring that into three-dimensional space. Typically during Amateurish interviews (such as my own), there is a lot of camera shaking due to a lack of tripod equipment and visual indications of the camera used to record (such as borders on old bus cameras). I also feel with the inclusion of phones into everyday social relevancy, there is a lot of video footage that would not be done on professional cameras. Trying to explore this within the realms of my one film, I added additional borders to accentuate the technology used to “record” and “capture “ these anthropomorphised houses. However, I felt these effects were too jarring from one another and distracted viewers from the main content and animation, therefore scrapped the idea.
Since the film intends to be displayed in an exhibit, I wanted to enable accessibility options, so in order to do this, I added some subtitling so that the content is clear in case any hard-of-hearing people wish to view the piece and have a contextual understanding. I also feel this will be good for exhibit purposes as only two people can use headphones per screen, and it allows space for more people to watch and understand the animation without inherently needing to hear the sound. While the sound does enhance the piece a lot, especially with the use of the Indexical voice of all my friends, it is not necessarily needed to get the idea across.