After presenting

After we presented for our ideas for the final time, we saw what John Screeton (who was also selected to produce something for the backdrop) had done and it turns out he has the middle of the Orchestral piece finished but not the end or the beginning. I suggested to Nick that we could join forces with John to make the work loads less for us and to also save me, Nick and John having to put together 2 separate pieces when we could just all work together and probably end up producing a more interesting and varied piece. So that's what we are now doing if the client allows it, and i don't see why they shouldn't.

Production

I almost forgot to put something up about editing all the clips we collected together, silly me. Best get started then.

I first put the music that would be played on the night into my after effects composition, because the video wouldn't be effective if i added it in at the end. I then started listening to the music and selecting the best clip we had collected to go into which place/order.

The music fades in at the beginning, so i thought the best clip to fit this would be the red slowly moving towards the screen seemingly out of nowhere, however i edited out the part where it hits the screen as i thought it was too early to introduce "explosions".

Once I had worked out where and at what time to cut it, i added some sharpen, hue and saturation, curve effects just to sproose things up a bit. I also had it fade out to the next clip because as i learnt from my earlier test, cutting from clip to clip doesn't look so great or classy. 

For the next part i decided to introduce the clip of green hitting the surface of the water which also fades in. However i stretched the footage so that it would cut off the water below as i knew i would want to use the waters as a separate clip later. Again with this clip i played with effects to make it look more presentable.

At this early stage of the video i wanted all the videos to fade in and out for the simple reason that the music was being a little undeceive so i didn't want to set a certain style or speed to the video just yet. 

Another fade in transition. I'll be honest, i didn't really have to do much to this clip for the simple reason it already looked good, however i did still play around with colour correction, hue and saturation and of course my favourite tool for blurry videos, Sharpen. The reason i didn't have to do much to the clip is that  it perfectly goes from right to left of the screen, I was thinking of having the jet shoot from top to bottom to create a more surreal look, but i didn't want to ramp up the video until the music got going.

The next part of the music went all cheeky, and i really wish we had filmed some glitter fluttering through the air with the slow motion camera, but alas we didn't. The only way round it was to introduce a clip where the liquid was hitting the surface hard enough for individual droplets to spray.

Another problem arose, i wanted to get the droplets in before the song changed from cheeky to orchestral and the only way of achieving this was to reverse the clip, even though this was intended as a last minute experimental fix it turned out to be really effective. The droplets are pulled back when i want them to, and just as the music changes again the goo forms back together then lifts off. Also for this clip i had to zoom quite far into an existing video then turn up sharped quite far, i'm just glad i haven't lost too much quality. 

For the next part i wanted some really close up explosion shots, again i had to use sharpen to my advantage. The music at this point is starting to take shape, so rather than fading out the clip i just simply let it snap to the next one.

This time the clip doesn't fade in, it just appears. One of the very first clips i used earlier had a bottom half of water, i cut that off and decided to turn it upside down to create a really surreal epic look. This is the part of the video where the music starts to build up more and more, so i thought i should do the same with the footage, introduce the better half of it that we managed to collect.

Again ramping it up, inspired by the very early work we did, on the first client presentation, the screenshots of the 2 same images mirrored which Nick produced. I started the clip just as the female vocalist started to drop in pitch, so the drop of the goo fits the drop of the pitch, and once the water rises the vocals get louder and more instruments are introduced making the clip fit in extremely well. 

This fades out, i originally wanted the downwards squirt of the next clip to go through the fading out centre of the previous clip, but it was best to let everything fade to pitch black as the vocals after this were really starting to get faster. 

 I thought it would be a good time to introduce a close up explosion shot, i ended up using one of my favourite clips for this, the green lube mixture explosion. With this clip i wanted it to fade in and be in the centre of the screen for maximum effect, i once again had to play with colour correction, hue and saturation and sharpness. It would have been great if i could've made the background pitch black but i honestly didn't know how, i tried using colour correction but it interfered too much with the goo.

I ended up fading this in because i thought it flowed well with this music, at this point the singing starts talking about flickering embers so i thought this shot fit perfectly with what was being said for the simple reason the goo here collides with each other in such a way it causes it to flicker in the light.

 I'm also happier with the end of the video than i am with the beginning not only because i wanted to end with the more impressive footage but for just the fact that the background was actually black.

Here there is talk of a falling star so i thought it was best to use a clip where the liquid sparkled like stars in the night sky, i also once again mirrored it just to add to the effect and utilise more space with the effect.

Almost done now, but i chose this clip because there are talks of floating slowly upward and i thought it would be nice to turn this piece of footage on its side and give the illusion that the stream is being shot slowly upward towards the sky when in actual fact it is going to the right.

This is it, the last part of the video, the grand finale at the end of the first score, this is by far the best shot in our whole collection, there are so many colours from the two colliding streams. It is simple beautiful I couldn't put it in any other place otherwise it would undermine the entire video. I played with some more effects to make it nice and bright, but it didn't need much doing to it as it is a utterly perfect shot.  

Fade to black

  

    

 

Today was a long one

Today we spent all day editing what footage we had collected into footage we could use not only for the client but for the presentation. Even though we had footage for the time lapse and the slow motion videos, we only just got a solid reply from someone who can get us access to stock footage of steelworks and given the amount of time it has taken to get a solid reply we have been unable to make a video for steelworks yet. We have however managed to produce a Time lapse and a Slow Motion Goo video, we would have liked to get more varied footage of Sheffield, but with lack of transport and time in regards to only getting our hands on a camera 2 weeks ago it has once again been hard. However this project is ongoing, I really am quite excited to see the result of it all.

It has been a very hard ride, trying to keep a steady mind while at the same time trying to be as professional as possible really is tough. I'm not going to lie I often had times where i just wanted to move far far away but it payed off as usual, hard work always does. Even though what we have isn't finished it still gives a good idea of what we want (and will) achieve.

This is the final Glowing liquid "UNITE" part edited by me, but the footage was  gathered at a joint effort.

This is the final Time-lapse "ALIGHT" part edited by Nick, but once again the footage was gathered at a joint effort.

More slow motion

This is more footage from using the slow motion camera on tuesday that i failed to  upload on the day. Some of the footage is a little dark but i can fix that when we edit the footage together, all that's left now is to come up with a storyboard now i have all the footage we need.

Same shizz, but with music.

This is the same video as that last post except now i have the music given to us by Timothy Allen. I think the music fits extremely well however we feel the video needs to be slightly reworked to give it a little more sync. We also feel that we need to slow down the footage more, to again fit the music better.

Today we visited the roof

Got up at 5 this morning... tired now. Before i pop off to bed i thought i better just write a little about what we were doing today. We both met at uni around 6:30 then proceeded to head to the roof of SHU, we got there everything was set up without any hitches until we discovered we had a faulty fire wire cable. Having a faulty wire however wasn't the end of the world, we could still use tapes, but knowing that wouldn't be the only thing to go wrong today the power cable came out of the camera so we missed the sun rise. However it isn't all doom and gloom we are all set for tomorrow morning.

Today we managed to get more than a few good shots around Sheffield so we have lots of footage to now be compiling for Fridays deadline/presentation. We also have some more time booked in with the high speed camera. Speaking of the high speed cam, I've compiled all the best bits of the footage we got and jazzed it up a bit to give an idea of what our finished piece may look like.

A little bit of time lapse

Last week me and Nick got up really early and headed for to to capture the sunrise in some areas of Sheffield, we settled for the train station. We set up our camera in two locations this morning both overlooking the same area but at entirely different angles. One view was a street level view looking towards park hill flats and the other was looking toward Sheffield college from the top floor of a building. We filmed for an hour in each place, i have used time stretch in After Effects to turn the speed up, i to give you an idea how sped up it is i set the time stretch from 100% to 1%.

This the the street view from the edge of the road looking towards the train station. (The city waking up). 

This is from the roof of the Harley located quite near to where we were filming from street level, however this is around an hour on. Apologies for the beginning, we were playing around with the camera setting to improve the shot.

Tomorrow we shall be filming we shall be filming from the roof of Sheffield Hallam which should make for some unique footage. Can't wait.

Using the High speed camera

We got our hands on the high speed camera yesterday, it was very productive. We did lots of little experiments that may end up in our finished piece. We used a glass fish tank for a large part of what we were doing, filling it with water, spraying the liquid from syringes into the water and also against the side of the fish tank. However one thing we did not know was that high speed cameras need an incredible amount of light in order to capture anything worth using, so we had to compromise with a slightly well lit area, however this didn't really effect the look we were going for.

These are just a few choice videos we shot the other day, I won't upload them all because there are rather a lot:

This splash lasted for less than a second but with a high speed camera lasts much longer and gives such a magical feel. 

This is the same idea as the last video but we mixed the glowing liquid into water based lubrication which added a bit more viscosity to the liquid.  

These are 2 colours that "UNITE", it creates a very surreal moment yet at the same time an extremely effective one. 

Headway

We have finally made some progress on all fronts, we have received an email back from Forgemasters Sheffield asking that they would like to talk with us about what and where we would like to film, while at the same we have now got a HD camera that can be hooked up to a computer and power supply so it can be left relatively unattended throughout the space of an entire day. It is also becoming more likely that we will get access to the roof of Sheffield Hallams main building to film part of out time lapsing.

This is the inside of forgemasters, this is the type of thing we would love to film and what is becoming more of a reality now, the camera we have access to is a tape camera but with a firewire connection it should be a breeze to extract footage from it. AWWWWW YEAH! The camera we have is a high end HD Sony FX7. 

First day back

Today we finally get our hands on a camera, this means we can now start our filming process. However today seems to be the most horrible day this year as the wind seems to be relentless and so does the rain, looks like today might turn out to be more conceptual that practical. Nevertheless we can still film higher quality versions of the experimentation's with the Florissant liquid which would give us a better understand of how the liquid would look in a higher definition also taking into account how well the camera films in pitch black. Before the Christmas holiday we also contacted 3 major steel companies which melt steel among other things, these companies are all based in Sheffield, so hopefully they will have gotten back to us with good news. If this isn't the case we may have access to some stock footage, even though this is not ideal it may well be our only choice. Some bad news, my Father was unable to get me and Nick into his workplace which was a rolling mill, this was due to the fact that the companies production secrets may be given away in what we would be filming, in other words they didn't really want us interfering in their everyday routine. So that sucks.

Plan for glowsticks

This is a drawn up storyboard to be followed when we are using the high speed camera in the research lab, it lists what experiments we will be conducting and also shows how long we want each chosen part of the scene to last.

 Hopefully when we get back we will get access to this equipment almost instantly then we can get on with finally filming and making what we envisage a reality.

List fun

We decided we needed to make a list of hings we may or may not need to achieve a good outcome in each area we plan to film. The lists also involve a description of things that may or may not go wrong while filming, i have listed opposite some suggestions that will limit the risks we will be taking.

Glow Sticks

Time Lapse

Steel Works