In this blog update, I'm going to talk about all the work I put in to the Production of Beware the Obelisk.
To make my idea a reality, I really needed an actor! I reached out to my close friend Johnathan to see if he would do us the honor of being our actor. Johnathan declined, so the person in that photo is my other friend Jacob Braxton.
The Sunday of week four, Team Mystic headed out to North Tybee Island to get all of the plates and data we'll need for Beware the Obelisk. We were originally supposed to film the week prior, but hurricane Ian came that week, causing us to postpone.
To prepare Jacob for what we needed from him, I put together this little video to show him the timing and action beats.
Jacob did a phenomenal job with his performance, and we are very lucky to have had him help. I believe his performance is going to sell the emotion of our project immensely.
HDR
Using the Sony digital camera I rented from The Cage at SCAD, I formed the HDR to light all the CG assets we'd need. To do this, I set up my chrome ball on Jadyn's tripod (for better ground coverage) and took 8 photos of increasing exposures.
The weather conditions were ideal some of the time, although the clouds in the sky were not consistent. While we did shoot some footage with the nice overcast, our plates ended up having more direct sunlight. The bright lighting and sharp shadows weren't what we were looking for EXACTLY, but as visual magicians we're going to find a way to still sell our gloomy, ominous tone through sky replacement and FX.
Color and Lighting
The chrome ball is great for capturing reflection data, but to get our color space data and lighting information, we needed more.
Footage Processing
My next steps after filming were uploading the footage so it's accessible by my team and returning the camera to The Cage.
With all that, here is the fruit of our filming efforts, without any VFX. I put together this edit in premiere to decide on the timing, so we don't waste effort on unused footage.
Comments