For this week we reviewed each other’s balloon project work and talked about what we had learned throughout the last 10 weeks, consolidating what we had learned. In addition I received some feedback to my video and the major one was the addition of sound which I had overlooked thinking we weren’t meant to add any sound to this project. Since then I’ve gone back and added it and re-rendered it. The work is presented down below.
In class we focused on doing clean up work. Removing elements from scenes that wouldn’t be wanted by using the clone tools, trackers and color correcting. Essentially using all the skills we had learned up to this point to achieve as seamless of a result as possible.
I have added a stain to the floor to continue my work on using the trackers in Nuke and getting a 2D object to appear inside the world. Alongside that I removed the text above the lockers and the fire alarm next to the door. All these changes should be obvious when compared to the bottom video. While I had some issues with the clean up, mainly forgetting to add the hold frame node and being surprised by my Rotopaint messing up as the timeline went forward. Though thanks to that mistake I have a better understanding of how the Rotopaint node works. The most difficult thing was the tracking of the 2D stain as some misplaced tracking nodes meant that it would jitter as the perspective was not correct likely because of improper node placement.
In regards to my continued work on my Balloon Project I came to the idea to create two opposing scenes. Based on the recent uplift on youtube for horror based around found footage or analog horror I wanted to create something similar. As a fan of lovecraft I created one scene as below of the valley with the ocean above it and shifted it to be hued in otherworldly purples.
With the other scene I created an idyllic comforting atmosphere with soft greens and the balloon. Mimicking something you’d see on a postcard
With that then I created in premiere pro this version of the video.
This one only has the transitions to it however I felt that to bring more home the feeling of an analog horror sense I’d need to add some VHS effects to it. While I initially tried to do it in Nuke I had difficulty achieving it using color correct and grade nodes and couldn’t get the muted colors and softness that, at the least when one thinks of VHS quality, you see. So instead I made use of some presets I had on Premiere Pro and made this.
This week we focused on Planar tracking and its uses when it comes to replacing objects in scenes. After learning how to properly use the planar tracker we were tasked with using it to replace a poster in a shot. Below is my work on that.
I replaced the poster in the middle behind the pole. Reviewing it now I can see that the mask on the pole needs some readjusting as it clips into the pole itself. I will address this at a later time when I have more time to work on it as I suffered a loss of progress when my hard drive failed. As a result I had to completely do the work on the balloon festival from scratch.
Though it did give me a chance to rethink my scene and figure out what I actually want to do with this project as I was inspired from the work that I saw during the previous week’s class. This will be the first shot of the scene and I am trying to make it as idealistic and postcard-esque as possible to contrast another shot I will split in later.
We also were made aware of concatenation and how important it was by going over several examples of broken concatenation resulting in blurry scenes.
This week’s classes focused on 2D tracking and making use of multiple trackers to create accurate 2D pins for surfaces. Along that we made use of trackers to stabilize footage to make it easier to work with and then reintroduce the instability later to properly incorporate all elements.
With that our home work was to replace the screen on a phone. We also had to design a screen to replace it with. While again my rotoing improves I still see obvious issues with it that I need to discuss and figure out as rotoing for me accurately is difficult. However matching the movements for the screen swipes was pretty simple to me. I also added a directional blur to the screen as it moves up as it makes it look more realistic.
Lastly I have a initial thing for the balloon festival. It is still very early and there is more I want to add but I need to find out how. One thing I want to add is, something from after effects, time ehco so that my balloon leaves behind copies of itself. I am finding it difficult to create multiple copies of one thing and integrate it into the scenes. Another is more visuals that affect the entire screen like either noise, grain or some kind of VHS looking affect.
Moving on from Rotoscoping we focused this week on color grading and correction. We went over the basics of how to properly do so in nuke with un-premulting and premulting images again to both maintain image quality down the pipeline as more and more changes are done to the footage and to avoid it affecting the entire scene. For our homework for this week we had to take a fighter jet and correct it to better match the sky its in.
I think that while there are some parts that can be improved for my first time it’s gone quite well. While I’m not totally sure what specifically is holding it back what I do think I did well on was matching the shadows and keeping the light consistent. As while I originally thought the back half should be more orange when I checked references online I noticed that that didn’t really happen from this angle. The reason being that since the sun is low and we have an upward angle facing down all that light would be blocked by the trail from this angle.
I had apparently misunderstood the nature of our last assignment and have gone back and improved on it. While it still has somethings not covered like a few instances where the shoelaces are not roto’d out properly given my current skillset with manually rotoing and the time I need to dedicate to other aspects of the course this is the best which I can currently do.
In addition to that we learned more about the tracking abilities of Nuke with the tracker node. It functions very similarly to AE where it tracks an object in 2D space (Though AE is capable of 3D tracking as well) and using that tracking data one can stabilize roto elements in a frame so there is no need to manually adjust complicated masks.
I have some experience rotoscoping in After Effects and for the most part it translates over pretty well to Nuke. While the rotoscoping I’ve done here is actually quite rough and incomplete I felt that for our first try at Nuke it would be better to do lots of different things and familiarize myself with Nuke rather than aim for perfection. I’m sure there are still plenty of things nuke can do to aid in refining rotoscoping work that we aren’t aware of. I wouldn’t be shocked if there was a tool like “Rotobrush” from AE where someone can ‘paint’ a roto onto a subject and then computer tracks that roto going forward much more accurately than a human would and much faster when it comes to organic subjects like a person.
This week we had a crash course on Nuke going over its interface and how it works. As someone who is used to after effect’s layering system the node development that Nuke has is very new to me. That being said I can already see how it would solve some frustrations that I’ve had in after effects development as with layering if I wanted to have something effect the foreground and background but not the middle then I would have to do a series of pre-comps and layering and the project would turn into a mess to read. However with the node system its quite easy since I would only link the effect to the foreground and background and the arrows are a very useful visual tool for telling what effects what. Another thing is the fact that it uses image sequences as opposed to using video files.
While this week was also spent going over the information we couldn’t go through last week because of the corrupted PDF it was again good for me as a refresher for what I had learned early on in my BA and to relearn it in the context of Compositing.
Our homework for the week was to create a short video on what a “city” means to us. This is a theme I’ve worked with in my personal work for a while now and while filming I realized that one of, if not the, most important aspects of a city to me is food. So I decided to concentrate that theme by filming food related public spaces in London. Specifically smaller locally owned food stalls for the most part. I also wanted to try connecting it as seamlessly as possible, as getting around a well designed city is pretty seamless.
For this week we did not actually begin learning the Nuke program itself. Instead, what we began to work on was the class’s development of Film language. Specifically we spoke about shot composition, camera angles, lighting and touched on lenses. As I have a BA in Film Studies I was already well versed in most of the topic but the more technical speaking on lenses and how lighting in a scene works from a technical standpoint like greenscreen spill was very interesting for me.
We also had some homework assigned to us to produce a series of pictures with the theme of ‘Time’. For my entry I took several pictures of my living room over the course of a day from, as much as possible, the same position. I then used photoshop to alter the lighting to what I believed each to represent. The day starting very blue as day breaks and gradually getting warmer as the day progress before reintroducing the blue.