How
to plan for digital effects:
Since you are on a tight budget, you must plan carefully
and shoot what you need. The first step is to go over
your script and highlight any shots that you are not sure
how they will be done. Some of these might be candidates
for VFX; some might work as practical shots. Once you
have decided your shot, a storyboard should be made detailing
exactly what is going to happen. It doesn't have to be
great art, just some sort of plan to get what you want.
If you have a certain look that you are going for, you
might want to clip photos from magazines that have the
look you want to achieve. Research!!!!
The
most important thing about budget VFX.... LOCK THE CAMERA
DOWN AND DON'T MOVE IT. What does this mean? It means
put the camera where you want it, tighten everything and
THEN turn it on. Don't pan it, zoom it, or even touch
it. any movement, no matter how slight, will add ten times
or more to the work and the cost of your shot.
Here's
why: in the Franky's Heaven shot above I mentioned
locking down the camera and shooting three overlapping
segments. The camera was panned from one spot to another
between the shots, but never during. When cut out and
placed in AfterEffects with the overlapping shots
next to each other, you end up with three locked off shots
that slightly overlap on the edges. Trim the edges off
untill you have one large image that looks like it was
shot in cinemascope. The tree line and roofline of the
house were all carefully masked in Photoshop to
cut away the sky and the offending steel building. Since
the camera didn't move, only one mask was needed, which
took about half-an-hour to make. If the camera had moved,
a mask would have been needed -- or animated -- for each
frame of video. That's 30 frames per second (29.97 actually).
That's 30 times more work and expense for each second
of your shot, which will be several seconds long. I think
this shot was ten or twelve seconds. That is a worst case
scenario. Sometimes you will be able to animate a matte
if the matte line is simple. In that case it may only
be ten or more times the work.
What
about motion tracking? This is useful but tough
to do, especially in MiniDV, and time consuming also.
Yeah
I know there are all those great crane shots during visual
FX in the Lord of the Rings, but that's where the
millions of dollars are spent. They also have these motion
control camera which can repeat the same pass over and
over and tell you exactly how it did it.
Why
bother with effects since I'll just cut away? Well
you can do that but it makes for a really boring film,
as just when you get to something interesting you are
cutting away from it. Most low budget movies are very
claustrophobic with lots of two shots of people, shot
in just a few locations. Even if you just stick in a few
digital mattes to set the scene for your audience, you
will be increasing your production value and the enjoyment
of your story as it will open it up.
Hopefully
this will give you some ideas for your next movie. In
future issues of Microfilmmaker Magazine, I'll
go through some in-depth tutorials to give you even better
ideas of how to do what I'm talking about.
