The U.A.S.R.E Archives - MITCHFORSYTH THINKS

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[mitchforsyththinks]

BA3b: THE EXIT STRATEGY

Moving into BA3b, I was very conscious to approach my final self-initiated project with as much a professional mindset as possible. This meant, deadlining, scheduling, efficiency, and proper handling and management of multiple responsibilities at a time. When making any kind of film, whether long form or short, it is a really necessary thing to plan and schedule the different stages of the project in advance, and do your best to keep to them, I have found. I have had enough interactions with film-makers and spent enough time studying the craft of film-making through reading and examination of the behind-the-scenes process to have built a fairly solid idea of how a production company might go about planning a project, and I took it upon myself to plan my own project with that in mind.

Though I hadn’t set out to work with others on the projects that I was developing, I quickly realised that another aspect of maintain a career in the creative industry was an ability to recognise where the limits of ones abilities lie, and when it might be important to draft others in on a project to help the outcome to be as close as to the vision as possible. It has helped me realise that the ideal position for me to have on a project may well be that of a director. The most important thing in developing a professional approach this past term was my involvement on the Curation team for the Ampersand exhibition in February. I found the governing position I had taken with organising all of the work, placement, curation, and show set up a very engaging and practicing experience. Moving forward I believe that selling myself as someone who can handle a directorial position may be a very worthwhile thing to do.

In terms of the next 3 or so years, I have a good idea of how I would like to start my career in the creative arts. For one thing, I don’t think I have finished honing my craft in an educational environment yet. The array of different practices that I have dappled in, though all sharing a consistent visual flair and narrative approach, have left me a bit in the woods as to what I do best. I think that extending my creative education into an MA might well be the exact opportunity that I need to discover this. Ideally I would move to join an MA course as soon as I can coming out of my BA, but then the expense factor kicks in. To be able to fund moving back to London and pursuing an MA, which would be my port of call, I would have to spend upwards of a year earning and saving as much money as I can doing whatever I can to earn money.

The thing that worries me about this is the potential to lose focus on my career and be sidetracked by the ebb and flow of an economy I won’t really fit into yet. For this reason, I am hoping to stay in Norwich to work- where I am aware both that I can keep cost of living down (in comparison to London) and also that I can still be surrounded by a creative culture. I have been in contact with a number of other students all with a similar game plan to me and we are working towards contracting a shared studio space from the end of the summer onwards where we can work on self-initiated and (hopefully) some commissioned briefs over the course of the year at the same time as working part-time elsewhere.

Throughout the course of this last term, I have worked on putting together a list of projects I have had on the back burner for the course of my BA, that I would like to revisit and complete over the upcoming in between year. These are predominantly made up of short publishing projects, zines, writing collections, and narrative exercises, all of which are either well underway, or in the early forming stages. The first of these projects is complete (titled Sensitive Men and their Delicate Words), in terms of design and content, and I am currently looking for a printing service that I could produce a short run of editions from. Each of these publications would run initially at no more than 75-100 copies, and I would be looking to sell them mostly online, or at publication events.

[mitchforsyththinks]

BA3b PROJECT SUMMARY

The thing that I have really come to terms with in BA3b is how well a collaborative creative effort can go sometimes. The end of second had left a sour taste in my mouth when it came to working with other people on one project. Whilst the year had been full of successes in collaboration, it didn’t happen without a real struggle. When it came to BA3b, both my work with Stevie on MAC YAMAMOTO and Maylott on DRIFTING went off almost without a hitch- and I say almost since I think part of the reason me and Stevie worked so well was that our supposed partnership with a UEA writer went so badly on our side. It forced us to design and decide of our own creative practices, rather than having to apply it to another persons, and soon we came to really we were pushing each other in really positive directions. The bounce back of ideas was really fluid, and there wasn’t really a point where either of us didn’t get each others thinking. The same could be said of working with Maylott. It really helped that he and I have very similar tastes in the kind of work we were going to be making, and so the vision was shared as well as the influence.

This isn’t to say I wouldn’t change how things had gone. There are a couple of areas of both MAC YAMAMOTO and DRIFTING that I feel could do with a slight retouch or shift.

When it comes to MAC, I think it’s the format that might need a rejig. Whilst the size of the book and the weight of the paper was very much a decided and intended thing for the exhibition copy, I think potentially producing a mass print copy in the future offers us an opportunity to play with how we size it. We had been aiming for a kind of ‘style magazine’ sized edition when it came to the exhibition copy, but I think the book could do with scaling down very slightly for mass print, and maybe adjusting the glossyness and weight of the paper stock so it feels more pocketable. A nugget of creative mystery, a kind of compact postcard book of narrative visuals.

With DRIFTING, maybe the only thing that I would like to really play about with now I have the film at this stage would be the sound design. I was reliant on the music to carry the film in a classic film musical sort of sense, but in retrospect I think it could do with some even subtle hints of ambient room sound. Engine noise, computer alerts, door openings, suit compressions. Even a continuation of the repetitive heartbeat sound to carry on behind the credits as they roll. Like I’ve mentioned, these are things to correct in the future when I can owe the film some more time.

A thing that both I as director and the audience need to bear in mind is that I had envisioned this to be the first entry in a series of music videos that would tell the entire story of Lt Henry and his Drifting in space (as detailed in BA3a). I think as it stands, this cut of DRIFTING acts as a stand alone music video. It is concise, and starts and ends. I would like to continue on with this project, and potentially expand it into the live performance event. When I started writing the music about a year ago, it was born from a love of the 70’s concept album and a challenge set by my tutor to ‘write a space opera’. Live performance could really be the thing that sets the project a flame in terms of finding and delivering to an audience. Even the notion of putting a collection of musicians together to perform the music live in front of the film as it plays would be an interesting interactive experience for an audience member. If anything, there’s something about live performance that can redefine what a script or a recorded tune is actually for.

I think the main thing I set out to do in this final unit was to make the best use of the facilities and time as I could, and in when it comes to both of these projects I don’t think I could have done so any more. I set myself tight deadlines as to getting every little section of each project done within, as to maximise my efficiency and the constraint of having that final cut off date. Everything essentially went off without a hitch. In the time, I’ve also managed to secure solid and engaging roles in both the curation of Ampersand show in February, and our upcoming final degree show. Balancing my inclusion in these teams with managing all of the project work was certainly a challenge, but keeping myself to tight weekly deadlines and quotas really helped to keep everything under control and moving forward at a steady rate.

This past term could have been both my most enjoyable and most successful unit of work in the whole of my 3 years. All of the practice and thinking and process really felt like it was culminating positively and actually, and the portfolio of work that I have now feels solid and considered and uniquely me, which I suppose was the best outcome that there could have been.

[mitchforsyththinks]

DRIFTING: THE FINAL CUT

This is it, the final cut of the film as of May 19th. I am really happy with it and hope that it can show all the work that has gone in. It feels weird that 3 months worth of solid work has amounted to 6 minutes worth of footage. There are still some things that I would like to correct for what could be a ‘festival submission cut’ or an ‘exhibition cut’, but as it stands now, everything is in its right place. 

Enjoy, mystery internet audience.

[mitchforsyththinks]

EDIT

On May 14th, I finished building and rendering all of the shots for the film, in the end cutting it down to 51 individual VFX shots. It had been a hefty process and I had learnt a lot about both digital and practical effects. Now was edit time. 

It didn’t take long to edit down the 8 minutes of footage cache into the 6 minute final cut, about 2 days work in total. There was a lot of dropping in and out different shots, especially when putting together the last two and a half minutes of the film. I really struggled with the pacing of the approach to the destroyed room, which was something I had thought would be a big climactic focus of the end of the song. Actually, the climax was in the reveal of the scale in the big pan out, and when I realised this it was a lot easier to cut the film back. 

I kind of worked from the outsides in when it came to the edit. From the very early stages I had always known what the start and the finish of the film would be, and it was just a case of rearrange the sandwich meat until I was happy with the flow and pace. Whilst I had tried to avoid cutting too much to the rhythm of the music, it wasn’t until I embrace the natural musical cues and rhythmic swells that the pacing and progress of movement in the film really came together. Again, it’s all a learning process.

[mitchforsyththinks]

VFX

The Final Stages- Once I had compiled all of the shots I had built, it was time to cut them to time. In the end, it took about 2 and a half weeks to put together the cache of 55 ten second to minute long VFX shots that I was going to build the film from.

At this point, I had made so many timing plans and early cinematic cuts that it was sort of a case of slotting each shot into the different cut markers I had decided upon and seeing which worked best for the flow. Above is one of the first draft cut-to-time segments. There was a lot of testing that happened at this stage. In my head, the song could be split up into 4 parts-

-The Console Rooms

-The Lying Down and Flashbacks

-The Approach to the Big Zoom

-The Big Zoom

Each of those quarters had very precise start and end points that aligned with musical queues, as well as set shots that would be returned to and sort of overarch the segment. The big zoom was something that I had been planning from a very early stage, and Maylott had printed and designed a really fantastic miniature of the whole ship based on my drawings, maps, and prints from BA3a. Thank you to that great dude for being an excellent working partner on the project.

[mitchforsyththinks]

VFX

Helmet Light On [Close-up]- One of the final shots of the final, and a chance to again use the interesting feature of the laser force field. In the shot preceding this one, our astronaut was seen to open a door, denoted by the emergence of a blue light, and then it close behind him, so I knew that this shot would have to involve a source of some sort from this blue light. I thought this would be a good opportunity to show how these fields might be switched off something, so I used a slightly less in focus version of the effect I had put in around the hull and had it gradually wipe off the bottom of the screen, as if shutting down. Initially, it sort of looked like there was a water level slowly going down around Henry in the suit, so to counter this I again hunted back through my previous effects and used the ‘reflection of space in the shield’ again, which I think largely worked. 

Throughout a lot of the effects shots in the film, including this one, I had made use of After Effect’s 3D camera function. It allowed me to separate the different layers of the footage in a 3D environment, and place camera points around this environment. This helped hugely when it came to panning and zooming. At the very start of my After Effects practice, I had spent a lot of time trying to automate consistent scaling up and down of the different components in a shot, but a lot of the time and due to the cumulative nature of scaling in the engine, things would shrink and grow at really inconsistent rates and avoid any sense of natural parallax at all. The parallax you would get from moving a camera through an environment was something I was very conscious of replicating within my ability because I knew it would be one of the key things that would blend the keyed in footage with the backgrounds. After figuring out the 3D camera, the parallax of a shot was a lot easier to replicate, seeing as you could control the distances of objects in space and the camera would account for them.

[mitchforsyththinks]

VFX

Console Room 2- This shot was a little harder to put together. Since storyboarding, I had always planned on having a shot where the central character would be looking out, over the computer controls, and into the vastness of space drifting past before him. Now that I had established the ship’s windows being surrounded in a kind of laser force field, the windows would now be something I would have to place in-shot, rather than just being assumed. To give the impression of a glossy window surface beneath the force field, I attempted to create the reflection of space. By reducing the opacity of the drifting space image, and slightly increasing the intensity of the glowing stars, I think I pulled off the sense of it being a reflection fairly well.

Another thing to note, and the final effects layer that I added to most of the film, was a film grain. Whilst a lot of the live action shots did have a natural grain to them, none of the backgrounds (mostly being static digital images) did. The grain was lost on a lot of the live action elements when they were reduced in size to fit in the environments, but I really liked the effected it had on a lot of the lighting of the footage. I played around for a while with a lot of the preset ‘add grain’ engines on After Effects, before deciding on to make my own film grain adjustment that I could use across the board on most of the footage. It needed to be subtle enough that it didn’t affect the colour of the film, but present enough that it was noticeable. Once the balance had been adjusted to what I thought was perfect, I also realised it was doing a good deal of reducing the slight contrast in the keyed footage and background photographs, which was great seeing as that was my main point of concern building the effects.

[mitchforsyththinks]

VFX

Console Room 1- I tried to make a fancy VFX breakdown video but it ended up being even more complicated than the process of building the effects so this will work just as well. Building a shot layer by layer in After Effects worked mostly as you would expect. I would start with the main background interior, in this case the upper room of the bridge. Then it would be a case of keying in and blending as best I could the live action element of the shot. 

The blending process happened most of the time through a mixture of different digital blurring, colour correction, and masking. I think I did a fairly good job of placing the live elements in the static photographed miniatures, coming at After Effects with fairly little use and experience. 

The next part of the build process was working in an exterior. I think this shot is a good example of how this would happen, as it included a focus shift from background to foreground. I wanted space to always be moving slightly outside of the ship, making it seem as if the ship itself was drifting through the vastness. This was done using really high resolution pictures of the outer reaches of the galaxy available from the Hubble Space Center Flickr image archive. I would enlarge these pictures as much as possible without compromising the quality, and then just animate them to move and rotate very slowly behind the hull of the interior. A detail that I thought would be a nice touch that was added fairly late in the process of making the VFX was the inclusion of a kind of force field layer between all of the windows of the ship and the vacuum of space outside. These were fairly simple to put together; it was just a case of making a large transparent Cyan shape to sit between the space image and the interior shot, and then applying a kind of ‘old warped television’ animation effect to it as well as a opacity barring. I think it worked really well, and provided an opportunity to create some interesting lighting in the latter moments of the film.

[mitchforsyththinks]

FILMING

Test Effects- Over the course of the shooting week, I had immediately begun roughing out the effects and the keying in after effects. I made a set of really rough drafts of the larger more elaborate effects and cut them to time against the music, as a way of working out what we might have to shoot in the week of pickup time that I had allowed for. 

[mitchforsyththinks]

FILMING

Filming Begins- At this stage of the project, Maylott had become so involved in helping me both build the suit and think through the shoot that we kind of came together to shoot the film. I had planned for roughly 5 weeks of shoot and edit time.

It was a troubling time arranging a shoot space. Both me and Maylott had shown interest in using the university’s own large scale green screen set, but due to a fumble with health and safety we were denied access. We ended up getting hold of a pair of 3x2m chroma green sheets, and in conjunction with the modular studio furniture, were able to set up a kind of adaptable green screen set in the Illustration studio. The lighting in there was fairly flat and white, and by the time that it came to shooting there were, once again, issues with health and safety allowances that prevented us from renting a lighting kit. We relied and worked with what we had, which ended up being fine.

The live action shoot took about 3 days in total in the end, aiming for about 5 minutes of footage in total. Due to the quick turnaround in angles of shots, the actual filming time for each shot would only last for a minute or so, but setting up the right angles for lighting and keying would take upwards of half an hour. We spent a further 2 days filming the miniature against the chroma background, with a view to returning to it if need be at a later stage.

Once these two key elements were finished filming, it was time to move onto the visual effects and keying.

[mitchforsyththinks]

G.U.I (PART6)

Titles and Credits- For a titles and credits sequence, I thought it fitting again to build the type and the display in the same visual style as the GUI overheads. The font used for the main opening titles was one designed as a part of BA3a for a U.A.S.R.E logo. I took the titles and credits into After Effects and ran them through some photo and video filters to give them a slight nuclear glow, as well as a slight boil in the line.

[mitchforsyththinks]

G.U.I. (BONUS PART5)

Console Faces- originally I had envisioned that I would film hands interacting with a flat surface against a green screen backdrop, and later superimpose the computer consoles that I had designed for the miniature in behind them. There was something a little jarring still about the green screen and miniature interaction in my early keying tests, especially at a close up. The rest of the G.U.I screens I had designed looked really slick and effective and exactly as intended, but they too seemed a little separate from the rest of the film even when cut closely.

I realised I could bring these two elements, the miniature sets and the GUI screens, together by attempting to build an actual interactive set. That said, there wasn’t a lot of time for me to learn the programming I needed to put an app together that could work with my graphics so instead I thought to go old school.

I made a pair of looping videos, one for a right hand console and one for a left, to be displayed on an iPad or another tablet of relative size. Set them to display button lights at certain rhythmic intervals. By pretending to hit the buttons at the point of the lights rhythmically flashing, it could look like it was an actual interactive computer screen. It was all in the bluff.

I was sure to frame the shots fairly close up, hiding as many  of the crimes as I could, and build an MDF cut out overlay that could sit over the top and place it on the dashboard of the ship. Then it would only take a bit of dropped in green highlight to make the character in the following and preceding shots look like they were interacting.

[mitchforsyththinks]

G.U.I. [COMPLETED]

The finished animated GUI sequences in the order they would appear in the film.

[mitchforsyththinks]

G.U.I (PART4)

Crew Photograph- Early on I realised I needed some sort of trigger to callback Henry to the disaster that took his crew from him. First thought I could string some sort of Shining-esque ‘bloodied twins in the corridor’ sequence that would have Henry look into a room and flash between seeing his crew fondly interacting around a table, and a table of burnt corpses. This seemed a little too upfront and maybe not the tone I was aiming for.

Instead, I came to use repetitive callbacks to a photograph of the crew together. The film would see the photograph gradually getting clearer and clearer and closer and closer before it begins to burn up around Henry in the centre. I gathered a set of helpful willing participants to form the crew and had them each pick a fantastic astronaut name. They didn’t disappoint, from left to right:

-Cargo Officer Chip Yeoman

-Science Officer Leionhjerta

-Lieutenant Henry

-Terraform Specialist Chaz Standard

-Computer Technician Michelle Matherson

When it came to filming this, I was really struggling with the framing. The environment that I was shooting in didn’t allow for the flame to fan very easily, and it would often go out before eating into the photograph too much. In the end I had a change of plan, and adapted the photograph into another computer readout. One by one, the characters would wipe to black, before their respective name plate would read ‘TERMINATED’.

[mitchforsyththinks]

G.U.I (PART2)

Food and Fuel Critically Low- The second readout would display the onboard store and the various quantities of cargo, ending in a readout telling the lost Lieutenant how many days worth of rations and energy he has left. The scrolling list screens are callbacks to the heads up displays of the Nostromo and Valley Forge from Silent Running.

[mitchforsyththinks]

G.U.I (PART 1)

Engine Failure- the first computer readout would confirm with Henry that the engines were indeed still destroyed. I designed the different elements in Photoshop and compiled the animation together in After Effects, trying to give it a kind of jerky loading time by delay the tween progression.

[mitchforsyththinks]

G.U.I. (GENERAL USER INTERFACE)

Again, another note to take from Alien. The incomprehensibility of the computer systems. The weird stylistic vision of how the main computer hub runs.