Final Shot
Because of the spiritual nature of the protagonist in The Guardian, it was important that the final shot of the hero involved him becoming somewhat unbound from corporeal reality. To do this, director Nick Denney wanted him to start to generate a glowing light that would overcome his entire face and then flood across the screen. Magic Bullet Colorista was our go-to effect for this, as it allows basic masks as part of the plug in and has a very natural way of dealing with color. It also gives you a nice look when it comes to both Saturation and Exposure. We used a number of adjustment layers with different intensities of Exposure so that as the circular overlay over his face starts to grow more pronounced, the general light levels of the rest of the shot increase, but at a slower pace. Eventually, the light breaks out from his face and across the plate.
The actual mask options that come with Colorista allowed us to do basic control of the light emanation from the face.
After we created this, the director realized that it would be good to have the light coming from all exposed flesh. As such, we had light begin to come from his hands shortly after the light starts breaking out from his face. At first, we started with duplicates of our previous Colorista adjustment layers, but it became evident that we’d need to tweak the timing quite a bit, not just move the masks and start time. Additionally, we had to add rotoscoped masks to prevent the light from growing too fast or appearing to come from his clothes. When it was all said and done, the light starts from his face and then begins coming from his hands until the light builds and washes over the entire frame.
In order to get final control over the more minute illumination, like that which comes from the hands, we used feathered masks to limit how and when the light could burst forth.
While it was a lot of hard work, in the end, the effects in the Guardian enabled us to augment the film in a way that the director was pleased with and that we were pleased to be a part of! And, at the end of the day, that’s what all effects artists wish for! (Plus, personally, doing as many effects as we did on this film helped inspire me to think outside of the box on what is possible on a low budget!)
The
director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films,
Jeremy Hanke
founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make
better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.
