Genesis. Hoping against all hopes that this will be worth it.
Commence assembly!
We actually had a really great system going. Years of working for an engineer doing tedious work prepared me for this night.
Mission Control
The smallest boxes were the worst!
If only 7 year old me could see me now, she would say- "What are you doing?! Why are you not making a rocket ship fort?!"
Commence Stacking!
We may have taken advantage of the projector and put Scrubs on while we set up.
My 2D model for this monstrosity. I am really glad I did this beforehand because it would have been a logistical nightmare figuring this out with the actual boxes.
Almost there! I was getting rather giddy at this point because of how awesome it was looking.
A result! We played a 16:9 video clip that was on my desktop to see how it would look. Matt and I were stoked on how it looked! Definitely worth the hours of set up.
This is the Magnifying Glass Test. I will have you watch the video first, then I will explain our process and what we need to do differently:
How we did it:
First, I filmed the footage that was going to be projected, or what you would be seeing through the magnifying glass. So I made an acetate paper guide of a circle so I could better see what I needed to have inside my frame, and taped that to my display. Than I tracked from where the glass would be hanging up on the wall to in front of his face in time with the music. Then, we brought that footage into After Effects, put a mask over the footage so only a circle was peeping through, scaled that down to the approximate size it needed to be for the projection, and then animated it's motion from being hung up on the wall to being brought down in front of Matt's face. We then exported that clip and projected it onto the wall where Matt was doing the choreography that aligned with the projection. For a first attempt that happened really late at night, I am happy with how it turned out because it let us figure out the process that worked best for us and things that we need to do differently next time. Which are...
Things to do differently:
First film the actor going through the motions of the choreography without any projections so that we have a template for position and scale (This seems so incredibly obvious to me now I don't know how we missed this step).
Use a different lens that has a lower f.stop and therefore can do much better in lower light.
Add a motion blur to whatever is animated so the movement seems much more natural.
Use a better projector (I have an abnormal amount at my disposal) that has a refresh rate that matches the camera's so that flickering isn't there.
Put the projector off the the side and adjust its keystone properties so that it isn't distorted on the wall and so the camera lens can be centered on and parallel to the wall.
Now that we have the our basic process structure down, the rest of the month will be more storyboarding and proof of concept tests until our week of filming in April. I am also quickly realizing how grateful I am that I have Matt's help. This would quickly be a disaster without him and having his expertise has saved me many tears of frustration. Cheers for progress and successful collaboration!
This effect will be used either at the part in the song or in the verse before it. This test has nothing to do with projection, but this effect will be used in conjunction with projected images. To imply that time is just keeps on passing him by, without using something as obvious and kitsch as having a clock fly by, I want to have the actors motions sped up, but have his mouth still moving in time with the song.
So, to test this out I slowed the song down to 50%, gave my hands something to do, and hit record. I then brought the footage into FCP, sped it up to 200%, and linked it to the track that was playing at normal speed. It's fairly rough, but it was mostly a test to see if it work/if I would like it, and success! This will be making it into the final video (but of course I won't have him crocheting, haha)
So whilst setting up to film the magnifying glass test and get our feet wet with projection mapping, we went on a 3 hour detour due to reflections! Matt happened to catch an incredible occurrence that was happening against a screen that was lying against the wall. I had my reflector out and the light from the projector was bouncing off of it and creating the awesome effect! We had a lot of fun exploring and manipulating the way the light played against the screen depending on what was being projected and what surface was doing the reflecting. We are planning on incorporating the footage we captured into the final cut.
