Post Production

I started the post production section of my module by combining the clips and creating the credits with a font I feel suits my animation well, then making them scroll up like real credits in films. I also added a saying I had found and modified it to a quote that I feel suits the theme of my story quite well and adds a nice finish to it.

One of the most difficult parts of post production was masking out the rig because the image I had taken without Sam in the scene was a different colour for some reason even though I didn't change any settings between taking the photos. There was also a strange flashing effect that was happening in this scene due to the camera which I think may have been the camera as there was nothing else during these frames that could have effected the filming area at the time. I also had a lot of technical issues while masking the rig as when I tried to adjust a mask that didn't fully cover the rig it wouldn't let me change it which meant I had to create a new mask each time I wanted to change something. This was probably made harder because this was one of the first things I did and before this project I hadn't had much practice with after effects, but luckily tutorials helped me out a lot. After masking out the rig it also hid his shadow so I had to adjust the static image underneath this layer to be more darker and tried to match it up with the actual shadow as best as I could.

I found out while watching through the film on After Effects one of my scenes was filmed a bit too bright compared to the others, so I've had to put a filter over a section of the animation to make it darker. I think this worked really well as now the scene doesn't seem out of place and also reinforces the plan I had to make the film darker as Sams story developed and as his demon got closer.

The lighting when Sam puts on the glasses didn't feel like it emphasized that they were giving him an ability enough, so I decided to fix this in post production. I originally planned to create an effect where lightning was coming off the glasses while a shocking effect would course through Sam. I followed this tutorial (http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-make-an-awesome-electric-shock-effect--ae-26175) to help me achieve my intended effect, however this tutorial used a lot of paid third party plugins so I had to find alternative methods. I used the rotoscope tool to only focus on his eyes and the glasses, then when it comes to the scene where the glasses fly away I moved the rotoscoping focus to the plasticine flying away while having some remnants around his eyes still. I used the find edges effect to sharpen out the areas that were going to be shocked then used hue & saturation to turn the saturation down to 0, to reduce the noise find edges had caused. There was too much black in the area so I turned lightness up quite a bit until it was mainly white. To break up the shocking effect and to make it less stable I made a new solid layer and added a fractal noise effect to it then experimented with the settings so that only parts of the rotascope showed rather than the whole thing. I added an expression to the evolution tab of the fractal noise so it would randomise and made it a large umber so it would be random for each frame. I finally added a glow effect to the comp and made it green to match the lighting. I stopped following the tutorial at this point and carried on just adjusting the settings to the glow effect and the other effects until I was happy with how it looked. I decided against adding lightning to this scene as I felt the glow effect perfectly conveyed the idea I was going for with the glasses and it may have overpowered the effect.

 I knew while filming that I would need to add smoke to the smoking scene in post so I researched if this was possible before I filmed. After watching a few tutorials with different methods I decided on using the Particle Playground effect to simulate smoke. After changing the colour, adding a blur effect and playing around with the other settings I added a wiggle expression to the direction of the smoke coming from the cigarette to make it more realistic, and for the other smoke parts I manipulated the direct manually as the direction changes when the shot does. I found this very easy to do and the actual hard part was tracking it to the scene as I had to do this manually frame by frame.

The last scene felt a bit empty so I used the lightning tutorial from earlier and skipped to the adding lightning part, but when I realised it was just one effect (Advanced lightning) I stopped following the tutorial again and experimented with the settings myself. I quickly rotascoped the Envy demon out and made multiple layers so there would still be a background shot of him going at the same time. I added a wiggle expression again to the direction as I feel these are really useful for making randomised movements appear more authentic. I used the opacity node to make the lightning appear and disappear which I feel really added to the the dramatic end. Because the original shot I filmed was very dark I had to use a brightness and contrast effect to the rotascoped layer so that when the lightning appeared the Envy demon would also light up as though it was real.

I really wanted the title effects to be interesting and to stand out so people would remember the name of my film, and I found this tutorial for an effect I liked (https://forums.adobe.com/thread/924230) but unfortunately after following the steps I realised the shatter effect wasn't working for me, and  after trying for awhile to find out why or what the problem was I decided it would be more time effective to just make a simple title screen. The good thing about this is that now it won't take away anything from my film or seem out of place.