Making the digital video “Figure/Ground” Part 8: The Big House.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Happy Holidays! In this sequence, entitled, “November 14”, dad has returned home from the hospital. Many house shots. For the filming, we were lucky enough to be able to use a friends house with big open rooms and hardly any interior walls, which allowed us to be able to set up lights and camera quickly from multiple angles. Lots of masking and painting into images.
This blog entry is part of an ongoing series documenting the creation of my short film, “Figure/Ground”, about the death of my father, starring veteran actor Allan Kulakow. The finished film is a hybrid of photographic and painted imagery, created using Photoshop, After Effects and Final Cut Pro. The film uses many of the techniques discussed in my book “Digital Art Revolution”. I’ll document my techniques, approaches, decision process and frustrations in hopes that they’ll be of interest to digital artists and filmmakers.
In this scene, below, I’m supposed to be talking with the family. The idea is, the family fades away and I turn around and address the camera. It doesn’t work at all. The problem is the original image is tiny. I’m trying to blow it up 800%, paint on it, and have it look natural. I’ll have to come back to this at the end and try a different approach. It’s by far the weakest image in the movie.
It has to be good because it’s an important scene. It’s the only time I’m speaking directly to the viewer, as opposed to a voice-over narration in the rest of the movie.
It works fine once I turn around and speak...
Once I finish speaking (about coming to terms with dad dying) I animate my figure so it spirals off into the distance at the end of the scene.
Links to other entries about the making of Figure/Ground:
Digital Art Revolution Blog