Category: Collaboration project T3

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.

This week I proceeded to update and finalize the compositing of shots 3 and 4. As suggested I added distortion to space just before the portal appears mid-air. I used the Noise nodes, one of the red channel, the other of the green channel, and adjusted the size of the noise to be combined into the original footage and be used to distort the image. With the use of a roto, I merged it with the Original Plate for which the operation was Difference, to get as close as possible to resemble visual tearing in space.

After feedback from my teammates and Aldo, I also added grade to the space and extra Volume Rays to give the feel like the portal is emitting the blue light and hence affecting the colours of the surroundings. I’ve also added a reflection on the floor of the portal to help it settle in the space better.

For shot 4 I’ve mainly adjusted the roto of the character, tried to make a cleaner integration with the portal, added colder grade and volume rays to space. I also rotoed out the shadow coming from the character and added it back after merging portal shadow with the original plate. Now that I look back at this, it isn’t necessary, but in an earlier version, I was placing a roto of the clean floor back onto the footage of where the character left the portal. However, it was messing up with the script and wasn’t even necessary as it couldn’t be seen behind the portal itself.

I also used 3D camera tracking in order to create a card for the location inside the portal and place it in the scene more correctly.

For the portal in shot 7, through which the second character was jumping, I got the feedback asking to make it more detailed and realistic on which I worked in Houdini set-up. For more realism, it was essential to lower the size of the voxel for the fire, the division of the bounding box in which the smoke for the fire was generated, and apply a better shader. If for the other portals I used the shaders built-in and Mantra renderer, for this portal I decided to set up the Arnold Renderer in Houdini. It required an extra node in the obj menu for the volume to be visualized in the renderer, as well as a specific Arnold Shader for the fire.

For shots 8 and 9 to save time it was decided to implement an earlier version of the portal in scene 2. To make it look different, I applied a green colour in the shader.

It was my job to composite the shot 9, for which Xuran created the CG background, that we see inside the arches. To divide the work among us, Madeleine rotoscoped out one of the characters in that shot, and it was my job to rotoscope the second character. To save time, I didn’t rotoscope all the parts, but the ones that would appear in front of the arch.

One of the hardest parts was to fix the tracking of the CG assets, as they were manually tracked along with the picture background. With the use of transform node, I key-tracked the movement separately for the background, as the image on it is supposed to be miles away from the temple position; separately keyed the temple door and levitating parts on the right-hand side as when I was adjusting the door, the rendered picture of the right objects was cut off and looked incorrect (see below).

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The final step left is to edit the shots, add a grade, soundtracks, sound effects, and some text.

Now that we had all the basic requirements for the filming process, scouted locations, had a storyboard and shot list, we got down to capturing the footage and breaking down each shot into what we wanted to do. To share the files we used OneDrive, so that everyone has access to uncompressed footage.

There are 3 main jobs in our plan: compositing (clean-up, rotoscoping, adding 2D elements like graffiti), portal modelling with the use of particle simulation (in Houdini or Maya) and CG world modelling in Maya for the final location.

We then created the VFX schedule and assigned various shots to each member of the team, based on their personal preferences and strengths. Personally, I will be focusing on creating the portal for the graffiti tunnel, with the dust and smoke coming from the floor, as well as tracking shot 9, to export that information and to prove it to Alex for the CG world creation. I will also focus on cleaning up the harder bit (lamp) in shot 6 as well as rotoscoping myself in shot 9.

After compiling the whole footage, I made a quick edit of the project so we all would have the correct cuts and some visual guide to see what we want to have in the end.

During this week we focused on developing the concept in a structured storyline with the script, which was then broken down into a shot list and the storyboard was created. We also scouted for locations, creating a bigger list which we then filtered down to 5 main places to be used.

Madeleine was in charge of the script, which she wrote very quickly and professionally. Going over the first version and choosing our locations, we noted down which bits would need to get changed, but overall, the script remained pretty much very similar.

After the script was updated we noted down a shot list, where we decided to have roughly 9 shots in total. We also thought about the production elements such as props, costumes, potential VFX for each shot, and the sounds that we would need to get. Evanna and Alex then created a storyboard for all the locations, thus providing us with some visual clues as to how we will set up the camera and create the composition.

During the week, Gherardo and I went to the locations to get rough shots of the places, and to note down any backup or extra location that we might need to shoot. Here the locations we will be shooting at:

We then decided on which days that will be our shooting schedule keeping in mind of the weather forecast and which would suit which environment. The shooting is divided into two parts: one on the rainy day for all the places which are covered and the second on a sunnier/cloudy day where the spaces are open. I also made a rough VFX schedule plan to outline the further work that we will need to do until the deadline, which we will update once we obtain all the footage.

In the first weeks of the term, we narrowed down a couple of ideas that were interesting enough for all of us. Starting of a story about a different, undiscovered dimension inside a mirror we came to a various version of the usage of portals and finalised our first idea to be based around a few characters travelling through London via portals created from thin air or with a use of a day-to-day object, who are competing to get to the final destination. We wanted to involve a use of 3D modelling to make an animal character, like a mouse or a bee, as well as a couple of clues around the scene which will point to the direction of where the characters are going to.

For the second option, Gherardo suggested using an idea about uncovering an object or a set-up made from layers. At first the room or the object appears to be one way, but as you change the perspective, it is being revealed that there is much more to it and it is consisting of various layers.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CN2Z6kriPVI/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link – Original inspiration.