Visual Effects and Motion Graphics Student

@kcte-bishop

| JESS | 20 | YEAR THREE | UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH WALES WORK BLOG

1,096 posts

Evaluation

This has 100% been my favourite project to work on whilst I’ve been at University. It’s also been the most stressful project I’ve ever worked on. There have been so many early starts and late nights, some ridiculously long days too. But despite that I’ve really enjoyed all the time I’ve spent on this project and I’m so glad that I joined.

The VFX for the film has been really fun - I got to do a lot of paint out work for the film which was really fun. I also did some shots that I wasn’t entirely confident in, which was a great way to get some practice in.

We’ve also spent a lot of time on location filming for this project, from the first shoot at Buffalo to our last shoot at Pulse. I’m not a huge fan of filming but I’ve really enjoyed being on set and helping out with lighting and sound, as well as directing the actors on set.

It’s been fun working with other people for this project too. Every other project I’ve done by myself, with the occasional help for filming by other people. It was strange to be making decisions with Karl and Angus, and there were a lot of times where we didn’t agree, but I think overall we ended up making the right choices with most things.

We’ve still got a lot of work to do on the final scene. We filmed it this week and still have to edit it, do all the VFX, add the sound, grade it - but hopefully we’ll get it done in time for the end of year show.

I’m really happy with how this project has turned out and I can’t wait for it to finally be finished.

Master Edit V001

We have a master edit!

It’s been such a great experience to work on this project and I can’t believe we actually have an almost finished film. Obviously this has missing scenes and some of the edit needs fixing up a little bit, but I’m so happy with what we’ve been able to produce in the last three months.

So here’s our film (so far) - hopefully the final cut will be ready for the end of year show!

Teeth Shot

Here’s a final breakdown of my work on the teeth shot for Leah:

Gun Shot Two

This shot was done between all three of us. I did the initial creation of the black hole - Karl added the back of the barrel - Angus added the bullet. Here’s the Nuke scrip showing my work on it:

Gun Shot

Here’s a final breakdown of how I did the muzzle flash for this shot:

Aled Shot

This shot was a 50/50 between me and Karl, so I wanted to show the work that i’d done on it. This was mostly working on the lighting contact on Aled and Sophie, as well as creating the muzzle flash and the fabric texture for Aleds shirt so we could make it look more like it was appearing inside of him.

Bouncer Paint Out Two

Again, this shot has been explained earlier, but I wanted to show the Nuke script as well.

Bouncer Paint Out

Phone Shot

I’ve explained this shot earlier I just wanted to show the Nuke script for how I worked on it.

Bag Shot

So in this shot we had a woman walking along behind Ash, which we decided we didn’t want to be there.

Here’s the shot after taking the woman out:

Here it is before for reference:

First I tried to camera track the whole scene, with a roto that went around Ash so that his movement wouldn’t effect the track. This ended up not really working and there was a lot of movement in the track and it wouldn’t stick.

I instead decided to planar track the top of the wall and it worked so much better. I then attached the roto to this tracking information so that the frame hold would move in the right way for the shot.

I also had to roto around the edge of the bag so that it would stay on top of the patch.

Head Shot:

This is one of the harder shots that I worked on. It was kind of out of my comfort zone so I’m really glad that I did it.

It consisted of three different shots - Leah on her own, Sophie doing the axe movement and Sophie again just holding the axe in the correct place for the hit.

I had to Luma Key Leah off the background and move her so that she was in the correct position for the axe hit as they weren’t quite in line. I then had to roto all of Sophies arm for the still shot so that I could move it in the same was as the arm swing.

I then had to adjust the other shot of Sophie so that the movement of the jacket worked with the movement of the arm. I had to scale the image up ever so slightly to account for the way the arm had moved before as it left a weird line in the shot.

For the blood we used stock footage from which all had to be comped in - some of it I put behind the axe and some in front, as well as adding mist in there as well. I had to make a line for the axe to go into the head too, which was originally red but we decided that we wanted the blood to be darker to distinguish the vampires from the humans.

We ended up cutting the shot down by a few frames because we felt the timing was off and it now feels a lot smoother in the scene.

Geraint doing a test to turn our footage from day to night

Clean-up Shot:

This was probably my favourite shot to work on for the film, despite if being the most frustrating. There were a lot of issues with this shot, but the main one was the shadows that Kris was creating as he moved. His shadow passed over one of the clean up patches so I had to try and mimic it with a colour correction. Since the shadow was so subtle it was really tricky to do.

For the tiles on the left, we decided that the best way to fix it would be to take one of the lower tiles and move it back over the ones with the reflection. This worked so much better than my original paint out attempt so I’m glad that we eventually did that.

The other paint outs were a lot easier. In order to bring back Kris and Mari I had to Luma Key them back over the top. The mirror’s were a bit of an issue as the lights in them are so dark, so I had to roto the top of Mari’s head and Kris’ elbow, the rest were able to Luma Key.

Keith Barry-John V001:

Since Ash is using KBJ as his own FMP we needed to have it done on Tuesday, so here’s our cut for Ash. There’s a few editing, sound and VFX changes we need to make but it’s turning out great!

Head Shot:

I wanted to look up some examples to help me with my head shot and the main one we came up with was Glenn’s death in The Walking Dead. It’s brutal, but it really works for what we need to do. There’s a lot of really good reference in here so I’m definitely going to be taking this into account.

Pulse Filming

Here’s some behind the scenes of our three day shoot at Pulse.

Teeth Shot:

Teeth shot done! Here’s the node graph showing what I did.

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