Making the digital video “Figure/Ground” Part 9: Funny Pharmacy (Creating a Digital World)
Monday, January 4, 2010
Happy New Year! In this first Figure/Ground post for 2010, we’ll cover a sequence, entitled, “November 17”. This sequence is one of two that I’d worked on earlier in a more “painty” style and then abandoned this approach. I’m now working on it for the second time.
This sequence posed quite a creative challenge. It’s about waiting in a pharmacy in a bad neighborhood at three in the morning trying to get morphine for my father. Unlike most other sets, we did not shoot these on an actual location. Each person was shot individually in front of a green screen, not really reacting to each other, and we have no pharmacy setting.
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.
I sneak around taking pictures of a local pharmacy with my iphone. I’ll paste various elements from these photos into an imaginary pharmacy setting. The manager catches me and asks me to leave. Busted!
Although the color is still greenish as it is in the other sequences, I decide to allow a bit of sickly color into the background to help the mood. I actually filmed this image of myself, sitting on the ground outside my house. I was testing the camera, but my unshaved face worked well for this scene.
I created a fake drivers license for the scene...
Photographer Rick Jacobs was perfect as the psychedelic pharmacist. In the final scene, I take a still image of his hand holding medicine, paint out the labels and animate it in front of his face as if he’s raising his hand with the medicine. It works pretty conveniently. A student is working in After Effects in my class, and again, I interrupt him to show him my hand, animated in After Effects.
When the scene is done, I animate the background so that it swirls and distorts in a trippy fashion.
Links to other entries about the making of Figure/Ground:
Digital Art Revolution Blog