Final Outcome
Collaboration reel
Self Reflection
This was one of the toughest projects to work on during this whole term. Being appointed as project manager coordinator by Aldo, it became my responsibility to organise meetings and check up on all teammates to make sure they know and are happy with what their tasks were. Using Microsoft Teams was very convenient to schedule and have video meetings, whilst OneDrive became an excellent resource where we shared our files, Nuke scripts, and renders.
Starting of the brainstorm, we narrowed down the ideas to the main being about traveling through London with the use of various portals and the second about layers on top and revealing the layered scene by changing perspective. With more research, we confirmed the first choice and started working on scouting the locations, planning shooting days, and thinking about the shots. With the help of her director’s background, Madeleine made the script, which helped us to visualize the shots better. Yingyi and Xuran tried themselves out as storyboard artists, both of which looked great. Finally, we planned the shots, wrote down the Shot List, and started filming. It took us 2 days and most of the team was on the set, which was quite convenient.
After we got all the shots, now was the time to plan out the VFX schedule. I dropped down the first edit, based on everyone’s preference and strengths. During the meeting we perfected the plan and spread out the jobs, but not quite evenly, as some teammates were complaining about specific software not working for them. After that everyone got down to working on their shots, and we had weekly meetings to see where everyone was at as well as to help out or give suggestions or ideas on how to solve various problems.
My tasks included creating a portal for scene 2, shots 3 and 4, a portal for scene 4, shot 7, and for scene 5, shots 8 and 9. I was also in charge of compositing shots 3 and 4, had to help out Madeleine with clean-up in shot 6 (cleaning the lamp, precisely), and, as of last week, of compositing shot 9. It was a lot of work, which I couldn’t do in time at 100% each, so in some of the composites, I am not as happy with the results. For instance, the portal in shots 3 and 4 still stands out a bit too much and not as integrated into the scene. The light that it emits onto the surroundings still seems quite fake and not as realistic. Maybe using a light source with the correct colour on the day of filming would have solved that problem. I also tried manually making the smoke and dust to be flying off the floor, as the portal would open up and is a source of energy. A good suggestion from Mehdi was to use a simple shape of an increasing circle to create that burst of energy to move the particles and the smoke, however, I couldn’t get any good results in time. For shot 4, due to the perspective, it was easier to submerge the character inside of it and hence fake them exiting. To make it further realistic, probably a 3D model of the character had to be created and inserted into Houdini to simulate that wind and dust interaction as they exit from the portal. For portal in scene 4 (which the male character was jumping through), it was decided to go with the image of fire. The thing it lacked was more details and hence more realism. But it would mean that the voxels inside Houdini would be very small, and my computer was crashing every time I tried to adjust it and make them look smaller. Most likely, there is a way to solve it, and it’s one of the things I want to attempt again, after submission of the project. Shot 7 was one of the shots that technically would have required more thought prior to filming and most likely extra props during the filming. In shot 9, as I made a couple of unsuccessful attempts of creating the newly looking portal, I was running out of time and decided to use the first version of the portal I made for the easier shots 3 and 4. To make it look distinct, I changed the shader to be of green colour for this shot. Compositing of shot 9 was quite tough, we had to deal with overexposure from background light, causing faces, hair or back of some characters to be overlit and showing white blobs of light. With advanced planning of dividing the rotoscope between Madeleine and me, it made the workload slightly less, so I could focus on fixings other problems, like the position of CG assets, their movement, grading the portal to fit the shot, adding light effects like volume or god rays. Overall, that was the toughest shot for me, but I’ve learnt a lot. One of the biggest lessons taken from this project would have been thinking about lighting in advance, analysing the location, using green screen parts where possible such that we could have a better interaction with future CG assets.
As of the final week, due to the fact that no one replied or said that they didn’t have the time when it was asked for whom to be the editor, I volunteered to take on that role. That meant, that I would have to download everyone’s latest versions of the shot and work on sound effect edit, suggest few music tracks for which the team would vote, color grade it, and add the credits or any text. With a few miscommunications about who will be compositing the shot 8, the last week became harder to manage, both as the manager coordinator, as well as coping with the personal project and the Indie Horror Movie project. I started to regret a few of the decisions and choices that I made. The hardest part, which still affected me negatively a lot, was getting into an argument with one of the teammates, who decided that it was their decision to make changes to compositions of shots 8 and 9 a day before the deadline, without prior conversation and suggestions with the team. What I found absolutely disrespectful from their side was that they messaged one of the tutors the night before the deadline just to get a supportive and permissive opinion from a more authoritative figure, whilst still not saying a word about it to the team, only to use it on the day of the deadline as a strong argument as to why we should be using those shots. The actions of that person do not correspond to any definition of the words “collaboration” and “teamwork”. Most likely, some teammates will have a different version of the edit of the final project.
Overall, I am satisfied just enough with the final outcome of this project. The problem was a directly incorrect division of the tasks, evaluating what people are actually capable of, and being more strict to some of them. Had I myself had less work to do, I would have managed to produce better results. Still, this was an experience, as after all, one can never know what kind of people they will get as their teammates and a VFX artist not only has to produce good work, but also be a good team worker, kind, supportive, and just a nice person with whom the co-workers can get along.
