DM4298-2011-TeamOne: 16/8/2011

Today, I started off by discussing and brainstorming with my group members to come up with more ideas to present to our project mentor, Mr Pang. Previously, we had four ideas, however, they were deemed to be too ambitious, and did not really fit the point of the project, which was to do digital set replacement and/or extension. Hence we came up with more ideas that demonstrated the requirements of the project better. We also continued to develop the concepts further after they were approved.
The ideas that were finally approved are:
1) A shot in which the actor walks down a staircase, towards the camera, then stops and turns around as the steps lower into the ground. This reveals a door, which the actor approaches and activates.
2) A post apocalyptic shot, with the actor walking towards the camera. In the background will be a post apocalyptic city, with destroyed and aged buildings. The actor will appear to be the only survivor. The camera will be on top of a small "hill". This will give us a better view of the city scape. The buildings and rubble around the area will be composited using matte painting and 3d modeling techniques.

After fleshing out our ideas, like the mood and composition of the shot, the elements that would be 3d models or matte painting, we went around the school to scout for locations and encountered some problems.
Firstly, for the staircase shot, the staircase was originally supposed to be level ground, which would lower into steps when the actor approaches it. However, there was no way we could get the camera high enough to capture the shot at the angle we needed. We tried another camera angle (shooting from behind the actor instead of from the front, so the actor would be walking away from the camera instead of towards it), however, this angle cut off an important element in the shot: the steps. To solve this problem, we changed the shot so the actor would walk down the stairs and they would lower into the floor after that, revealing a door. That would have been perfect if the shot had stopped at this point.
However, Mr Pang told us before, that in order to make the elements believable, they would have to interact with the actor. So, we decided to have the actor approach and activate the door. This would really reinforce the idea that the steps had really lowered into the ground, because the actor would never have been able to approach the door if the staircase had merely been cloned out. This posed a new challenge, as the actor would have to walk into the area occupied by the staircase, or at least appear to do so.. In order to accomplish this illusion, we decided to film a shot of the actor walking into an alley next to the staircase with the exact same composition, camera angle and perspective. This would put him in the same lighting conditions as the other shot. This also put him in the shadow of the staircase wall. There was also a shadow of the staircase wall on the wall of the building. Back at the lab, Joseph and I tried compositing the shadow from the second shot onto the wall of the first shot. At the end of the day, we managed to figure out what we exactly needed to do for the staircase shot and the problems that we might encounter along the way.

Composited the shadow of the second shot into the first.

For the post apocalyptic shot, we managed to scout out the location to shoot it. We also took some photos to use as guides for our composition for the final shot. The main problem here was a lack of suitable locations as we did not want to shoot outside of school due to the amount of time we would need to travel to and fro. Hence we decided on a stretch of road on top of a "hill" in the school carpark. We would then digitally remove the grass and background in post production, then add buildings in the form of matte painting or 3d models and replace the sky and background. The sky would be done using either stock footage or After Effects, and the background would be matte painted. There might also be debris and buildings collapsing in the background to create movement, hinting to the audience that the background was not fake. However there was not enough time to do a mockup and run tests as it was already over 6pm.

I learnt many things today, like simple tricks to influence the audience to believe something was real when it was not, like interaction with the CG object and having motion in matte paintings, and that we should think out of the box in order to arrive at creative solutions. I also watched movies like Forrest Gump (and its making of) to research on ways the vfx supervisors use to trick the audience. Some tutorials were also found to try out collapsing and fracturing objects in Houdini. We would then place these into the background of the post apocalyptic shot.

Test Shots