This post is a merge document containing both:
- Review and edit sourced footage
- Apply visual effects to planned sourced footage
Application of the first visual effect- Colour Grading
Colour grading is one of the simplest forms of digital effects that you can apply to a video. This is useful as some of my shots didn't turn out how initially planned, so the digital editing of colour grading allowed me to go back and fix some of my previous mistakes or just make the shot look more visually pleasing for the audience.
An example of fixing a previous mistake this is in this shot, which appeared much darker than initially intended. This was an issue as only a slight bit of the foreground could be seen in the shot; seeing the background here is important for the audiences understanding of how the scene plays out, as it lets us know that there's something in the room with my protagonist.
I fixed this issue by accessing the properties of the clip and balancing the whites, highlights, shadows and exposure of the clip to make an overall better looking shot. This allowed the audience to be able to see the fact that the door was opening by itself in the darkness. It also made the scene much more satisfying to watch as a movie being too dark is a highly regarded criticism in modern horror movies that I wanted to combat in my production, whilst still creating a fear of the unknown with my monster hiding in the shadows.
Another way I fixed an issue with my recorded shots with colour grading was improving the continuity of the scenes, as well as just giving the movie more of a visual style that helps make it stand out. An example of a continuity issue with how some scenes were filmed is that the lighting drastically changes in between the shots that are supposed to be taking place one after the other. Here is an example below:
In the first shot we can clearly see that our antagonist is being hit with a dim orange light in the room where they are stood, but when the shot changes that allows s to see in to the room, the lighting is not only much more high-key, but also much whiter/yellow. This makes the room appear much brighter, which is an issue as it completely pulls the audience out of the immersion of the film for what is supposed to be an otherwise shocking and important scene.
And here is the updated scene after adjusting the properties: increasing the exposure in the first clip and increasing the temperature and shadows in the second. These changes make the scenes look as if they're are taking place immediately after one another and help to give more depth and meaning to the film; the orange initially intended making the scene feel hot with tension as we reach the 'boiling point' of the film. As well as this it helps to improve the cinematography by making the shots feel more stylistically distinct from the standard white/pale lighting.
This was a change I made to most of my scenes also, correcting the lighting and giving the film more visual flare with the colour grading so that the audience stay invested in my film.
I also enhanced my cinematography with colour grading and editing to conform to the conventions of my horror genre. In this example of my protagonist Quinn's phone light scanning over the environment, I edited the temperature, exposure and blacks/whites. This caused the light to be much more concentrated and made the surroundings darker. This made it so that I could directly control what the audience were allowed to see within the light, putting them in my protagonists shoes and allowing me to appeal to genre conventions of horror by creating a creepy atmosphere to keep the audience engaged and on edge.
Special Effects
As part of my project it's important to apply visual effects in post production so that I can make the short film as closely accurate to my vision of what I want the film to look like as possible. In the production of short films, especially horror, special effects are the way to do this.
As I have not only a budgeting constraint but also a talent constraint for the application of practical effects, it resulted in an issue of me not being able to find a way to create an effective dead body to communicate to the audience the twist of the movie. I came up with the idea of a close up shot of the hand, that way I can also solve the enigma of where the car keys were by having them be in the dead body of the mothers hand. I added a minor practical effect of fake blood (as seen below) but it still didn't feel worthy enough of a shot to reveal that the mother is dead, especially with the extreme lack of blood on the hand. This causes the audience not to be satisfied with the reveal as their audience expectations of what they expect to see in a modern day horror film is a lot of blood and gore.
(the shot before any application of Digital Effects)
This is why I decided I wanted to apply a digital effect to the shot to make the scene feel more 'gore-y'. Although I still had a digital effect talent constraint being that I couldn't create fake blood/gashes on the hand, it didn't mean I couldn't make the scene feel more gorey. I decided it would narratively make sense if I made it seem as if blood was dripping down the camera lens instead, implying to the audience that the death was so brutal that blood splatted everywhere, even on to the camera itself.
The first thing I did to create this effect was duplicate my clip and layer them on top of each other. I did this by holding down the option key and then dragging he clip a layer higher, duplicating it on top of the other.
I then searched for the 'tint' and 'gaussian blur' effects in the project window and added them to the duplicated clip.
I opened the added effects settings and mapped the black to a dark red and white to a lighter red on the tint effect. For the Gaussian Blur effect I just increased the blurriness to make the screen look like we (the camera) were looking through blood, causing the screen to be blurry.
I then clicked the 'new item' button in the project window and layered a black 'colour matte' on top of my clips. I then put the 'VR fractal noise' effect onto this new colour matte.
I edited the 'VR Fractal Noise' effect by adjusting the contrast and brightness to create a white stained fog like screen. This white fog would become my blood.
I did this by adding the effect 'track matte key' to my previous duplicate clip, accessing its settings and then changing the 'matte' to 'video 3' and changing the composite to 'matte luma'.
This made it so that the blood red overlay replaced the white and black of the fog-looking matte. I then further started playing around with the settings of each effect (mainly the contrast, brightness and opacity of the clips) as well as increasing the size of the matte overlay so that there wasn't excess blood on the screen and making the blood larger.
The finishing touch I added to this effect was editing the 'evolution' setting on the 'VR fractal noise' effect. I enabled the animation for the setting and created key frames at the start and end of the clip. The starting keyframe being set to 75 degrees and ending keyframe -13. This made it so that the blood moved on the screen slightly, as if its dripping down the lens.
Another primary visual effect I used was a glitch-distortion effect. This made the scenes I applied the effect to seem as if the camera the audience are looking through was glitching out to connote the world our character is in distorting and breaking apart.
I created this effect similarly to the previous one.
First I duplicated the clip I wanted to apply the effect to and layered it on top of the original clip. I then applied the 'strobe light' effect to the overlay and changed the strobe light duration to be 1 second and created keyframes so that more strobe lights would appear as the clip continues (first keyframe=0% random strobe light possibility, last keyframe=100%). This created a white flash effect on the clip.
As I wanted the effect to not show a white frame each time, I changed the strobe to 'make layer transparent that way when each 'flash' happens it switches between the top overlay and actual clip itself. I then made them slightly out of sync so that each flash would switch between 1 second forward in time and 1 second back. This is so that the clips gave the appearance they were glitching between one another.
To give the effect more of the appearance of a 'glitch' I used the effect 'VR Chromatic Aberrations' on the top clip which give the scene a blue/red outline every time the glitch appeared. I also applied the 'black and white' effect here so that every time the glitch happened the scene would flick between colour and black/white.
The final touch added to this effect was that I made the overlay slightly larger than the original clip so the size would also distort between glitches.
The final effect I added was a lot less complicated but effective non the less. It was creating my piercing white eyes that stalk the protagonist throughout the film.
I did this by creating a black background shape on power point and adding two white 'full stops' on top of it to give the appearance of eyes being caught in the darkness by the camera light. I then screen shotted it and imported it to my edit.
After adding the overlay to my scenes I got rid of the black background by adding the 'colour key effect to the overlay. This allowed me to select the colour black and completely remove it from the overlay so that only to white dots remained. I then added the 'VR Glow' effect to make the yes glow slightly like they were two specs of light in the darkness. I then duplicated this effect and applied it to every scene I had planned the eyes to appear in.
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