A failest test

Here's a test where Guy touches the megalith. In place of the megalith is a a blue box but unfortunately the box is chipped and miscoloured making keying very difficult.

Variation of Guy and the Megalith

This time Guy changes the colour of the megalith.



Slight problem is the gamma on my monitor must be brighter than the average monitor because when these videos are much darker when viewed on different monitors. Furthermore, when YouTube resizes and recompresses them they look even darker so I've made a second lighter version.

Interacting with the megalith - the experimentation begins!

A break down of how the scene was put together will come later.

Lightning Battle Breakdown

Here is an annotated synopsis of how the Lightning Battle was constructed.



Guy and Hugh were filmed in front of the blue screen. They completely improvised the sequence as nothing was planned or scripted, which did pose some limitations when it came to editing.


Next an image of Xilituzhao Temple Courtyard was sourced from Google Image Search. It was select because it had the most appropriate aspect to make Guy and Hugh look like they're actuall standing in the courtyard.


Now the blue background is keyed out. To get a better composite the keying was done in two halves so a mask was drawn around both Guy and Hugh to enable different keying settings. The yellow line indicates the boundary of hte mask around Guy


Next the background is darkened as this is intended to be a night time the scene. There are two reasons for setting this scene during the night, the first is because the lightning will stand out better against a dark background, and the second is because descrepencies in the keying is less noticable.

Previously I took an image of the clouds with my digital camera.


The sky is keyed out from the Xilituzhao Temple image to reveal the clouds in the sky. The brightness of the cloud image is also reduced to match the temple and the actors.


An image of a full was sourced from Google Image Search, I attempted to take an image of the full moon using my own camera but I didn't have a suitable lens attachment to produce satisfactory results.


The moon is composited into the scene then its Hue/Saturation altered to make it brighter and more yellow, then a glow effect is added.


Another copy of the cloud image is placed over the moon, the blue sky is keyed out and the edges are made really soft. Over the coruse of the video sequence the cloud image is made to scroll from left to ride to give the illusion that the clouds are passing the moon. The mauve line represents the path of the cloud image.


A volumetric filter is added to the layers behind the actors to give the lights a more realistic ambience. Unfortunately the volumetric filter I am currently using is unregistered and applies a watermark to the top and bottle of the video after 10 seconds.


Now comes the most time consuming part of the effects editing - the addition of the lighnting. The lighting must be told where to start and where to end which some times has to be adjust every frame. There are also two dozen other settings that control the intensity of the lightning, what it looks like and how it behaves, all of which must be adjusted every 5 to 12 frames.

Adding the lightning for the 55 second sequence took about 3 full days worth of work and it still could use a lot of refining. Effects like smoke and explosions could also be added to further but as the Lightning Battle is only a test it is time to move on to other experiments.


The Lightning Battle may be revisted later, but for now enjoy the edited 55 seconds...

The Lightning Battle

This was a spontaneous idea so there's no planning behind it meaning Guy and Hugh completely improvised the battle sequence.

The visual effects could use much refining but this is how I'm going to leave it because I really need to move onto other tests. There is little artistic merit in the Lightning Battle so it will not be developed further for submission.

Screen Shot from Lightning Battle

Exposure

While taking pictures of the moon without a tripod and using slow exposure settings I discovered it was hard to get a clear image. I seem to lack the dexterity to t hold the camera still long enough for it to fully expose the shot, although at times it did take upto 20 seconds.

I became curious and wondered what would happen if I intentionally moved the camera while on low exposure settings and this is the result: