Fiction Adaptation: EDITING GRAPHICS

The graphics process during post production was extremely time consuming but the finished product was definitely worth it!

I wanted to add an old fashioned tint on my film, but wanted the red apple and red rose to stand out in a bright red colour so they became noticeable to my protagonist in the story.

I wasn't sure how to do this and even Fergus was a little stuck too! Eventually we figured it out and I realised I needed to create a lot of masks and layers in After Effects to create a shape and add a colour over the top of it.

THE APPLE.

To begin with, I imported the clip of my character Nancy holding the apple up, I then created an adjustment layer and clicking on the original clip, drew a mask around the outline with the pen tool. After many failed attempts at moving onto the next frame and moving the mask I realised I was doing it wrong as the mask from the previous frame was moving and didn't stick in the position I wanted. I finally figured out I had the wrong key frame turned on and needed to have the mask path key frame turned on not just the mask general keyframe. In after effects the clip is broken down into how many frames per second (25) this meant I was editing 25 frames per second and if there was a huge movement in a shot it was annoying to individually move each little dot on the pen tool as for some reason I couldn't move the whole mask. After this I went to the colour correction page and clicked on the 'Curves' tool. This brought me to the RGB (red, green, blue) switches which I could move around to get a colour on my mask on top of the apple. I turned the red up high so that my apple would stand out against the tint on my film. I am really happy with the outcome however I know it does look a little cartoon like.

THE ROSE.

The process of making the rose red was similar to the apple, however throughout the very very long apple process I figured out a few things that made creating the graphic quicker. Firstly, I found out that I can actually move the mask on each key frame instead of using the blue dots to move it (which took so long). This made the process much quicker, but I needed to make sure I had the 'position' key frames turned on on each frame movement under the mask layer. Throughout this process I also realised I could use the tracking tool to track the motion of the clip and click on the rose so it would track the movement. This meant I could 'parent' up the mask layer with the tracking layer so that I only had to create the mask once as the mask followed the track. Most of the movement was quite smooth when I tracked the motion and didn't need much adjustments. 

I also realised that I could save a preset of the colour adjustment which meant it would be same for both the clips of the roses and I could save the exact colour I want. When creating this graphic I realised that the rose looked much better than the apple which was disappointing as I think it brought the look of the apple down compared to the bright rose. After a long few hours I finally had the apple and rose clips sorted out. I really like how they turned out, especially the rose as it really stands out against the background. The next step is to do the same again but for the small rose which you briefly see at the start of the scene as Nancy catches a glimpse of it from the corner of her eye. 

Here is a before and after of the rose which I'm pleased with.













The next graphic I did was create the smaller rose, this was the easiest one to do as I'd spent days creating the above too, watching tutorials on YouTube on how to do it, creating many attempts at the idea with a LOT of failures, but I finally created it, so had a lot of experience in how to do it. The small rose was easy to do also because of how small it is and the layer I had to create was really small. Here is the finished product. From zoomed it in looks very rough however when it's zoomed to it's original place it looks really effective.









The last graphic I needed to create I was worried about doing. I needed to import the character Jack's photo into a small locket that my character Nancy drops on the floor. To do this I decided I would try use the tracker as this would track the motion and hopefully line up the photo for me so I didn't have to spend too much time manually editing it in.
I began by first tracking the motion of the locket when Nancy holds it, she didn't move it too much which was lucky as I didn't want the photo to look too fake and obvious it had been added in.
After resizing the image of Jack and parenting it with the tracking layer, I finally had my starting point. I next needed to go over each key frame and re position and size it so I knew for definite that each key frame looked perfect. A lot of the frames didn't need adjusting, however the ones that did made the others look weird, so I ended up adjusting a lot of them anyway. This was once again a very long process however I got through it in the end. Next, I needed to change the colour of the image and turn up the brightness as it didn't blend in with the photo frame and looked too 'flat' and stuck on the image. I played around with added blurs to the edges of the photograph to make it smoother and blend in more with the locket, however I couldn't get it spot on and I still feel like in the final product it looks out of place, however I'm happy with the way it turned out considering I hadn't tracked an image before.

Here is the image of Jack in the locket Nancy is holding.

Overall, I'm happy with the way the graphics have turned out as I was definitely new to doing these sort of intense graphics in films. I definitely have pushed myself with this and have learnt a lot of new skills in After Effects which i'm happy with and feel more confident using the programme. 

The down side of learning new things is that it takes SO long to learn, I was getting really irritated that I couldn't figure out how to do some graphics and couldn't find any tutorials for ages and wanted to give up as I was using so much time up to do it, not knowing whether it would be worth it. However I'm glad I stuck with it as the rose and apple especially made my film look much better and I don't think it would of had the same effect if the apple and rose where just a normal dark colour and blended in with the background. I've learnt that time management is key and that I should try learn things before doing it as trying to figure it out yourself might work eventually, but takes ages to do.