Evaluation and Video

Evaluation

Filming

Filming was finished in two days. The first session took place in the college and was the more technically difficult of the two. The stop motion session was still pretty simple though with each shot being done in quick time. I first took a picture of the set with no one there so that it could be used for the Invisible Man effect. The only real difficult part was filming the punch at the end. This took a couple of attempts with some different angles. We first tried it from the side and then we tried it from behind. I went with behind as it meant you could see more of us and it looked like the better shot(The rest of this is covered in the editing section).

The second session was me alone and was done when a problem arose. It was too short. I decided to film some stuff that I had originally planned to do but thought I would go over the time limit. I did go over but I think its better to have more work than less work. I decided to try experimenting with the lighting (Something I'd only really done in one previous project and some Youtube videos) and used a small spotlight lamp to illuminate the scene. This was done to give the effect of Jonah focusing only on the case at hand and nothing else around him. The scene was also partially a spoof of a big scene in Red Dragon where the main character figures out that the villain had slipped up. In the book and Manhunter it was very dramatic and very well acted but in Red Dragon it felt extremely forced. I always found this to be amusing.

Editing

Editing began on photoshop. The first part was to edit parts of Parker out of the pictures starting with the face and hands and ending with everything bar his hat. This was done by taking parts of other images in the sequence and layering them over the picture that needed to have parts made invisible. I then erased parts that covered up his body and left the parts that covered his hands and face. Doing this meant that you could seemingly see right through him. After this was done to all necessary parts I then had to edit Parker's hat by itself floating across towards Jonah and his partner. This was done by using the tweening tool. I originally was going to animate it through pictures I took but these couldn't be used. This was because of the angle in which they were taken meaning that the hat was only on screen for about 3 frames. I instead cut out the hat from one of the other frames and used the tweening tool to animate it moving across the hall. It looks rather silly but it fits in tone with the rest of the project. The climax of the video is the Detective punching Parker unconscious when he's invisible. Since I could not predict how the hat would react I first had Carl himself standing there. I was going to erase him like I had done previously. Half way through I realised a problem. He was standing behind me and was blocking off part of my body. I wouldn't be able to make him invisible without erasing part of me. Instead of this we just had Carl hold the hat approximately where his head would be and then just erased his arm holding the hat. There was also the problem of his hand appearing in some of shots, blocking my body. This is why the KAPOW effect partially covers me.

After the animations were done I began to render. The first problem encountered is that the file size was too big (It exceeded the 2GB limit) so I had to split the project up. The next and biggest problem came when it finished rendering. It had become an audio file. This made it unusable. After various people came to try correct the problem, I decided to mess with the setting on the rendering screen. I'm unsure as to what I actually did to fix it (It's likely it was changing the present to Youtube Video 1080p) but it allowed the videos to render. After they had all rendered I tried to import them in Adobe Premier pro. This caused problems. It didn't except any of the files that were less than a second long. This being most of them. In order to fix this I had to take it back home to use Sony Vegas.

Yet another problem came up when I started editing on Sony Vegas. It again wouldn't import the files. This was down to the format this time so I converted them from MP4 to WMV. This solved the problem and it went pretty fast. It lowered the quality quite a bit but it was the only way it could be done. After this it went fine. Editing was complete in a couple of hours. 

That was until later on when I realised that the video was too short. I decided to go back and film some new scenes of Jonah realising who the villain is. These were all video clips so after being converted they easily fit into the timeline. I only had to move everything else forward a little on the time line. 

Conclusion

In conclusion I think this project has good points and bad points. Not the best I've done but not the worst.  I would like to have developed the story more and given the other characters more of a personality but due to the time limit and our dead line I couldn't do that. I would also have found a way to improve the quality. It has a noticeable drop in quality which is infuriating me. I’m unsure of how to fix this and still use the same software as I’ve been dealing with this for years now. I think that the project was okay, not amazing but it’s still pretty entertaining in a Youtube parody sort of way. I’m not sure whether this is a good thing or not. I’m overall disappointed with the project as I thought it could be a lot better if I had more time to develop it and I would also like to have improved the animation.