VFX Induction Project

'The Thing That Must Not be Named'

Ooooh, spooky. Our first project was a vfx/filming project where we were tasked with creating a news report of a sinister video. This would be our first vfx project as well as our first group project.

Pre Production

As a starting point, we began brainstorming ideas for our production. Inspiration from 'The Blair Witch Project' was a given due to the use of a handheld camera. We settled on a plot where a group of teenagers come across an abandoned bunker in the woods and are promptly brutally murdered by a monster. Nice. With that out of the way, we planned when and where we would shoot this ground-breaking production. A forest would be used for the 'mysterious video' and the news reports would be filmed with a green screen. We created a storyboard, script and animated logo/introduction. I wrote the script; deciding to format it like a traditional film script with the courier font and layout to make it look professional. It wasn't a long task, as the production was to only be around 1 minute long.

Recording

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Green Screen

As mentioned before, we used the green screen studio for the news report scenes. These were easy enough to shoot and only took a few takes for each of the two scenes.

Off-Site Recording

For the bulk of our footage, we went to Epsom bunker for its naturally spooky atmosphere. We felt this setting would add a lot to the production, making it more believable and unique. We followed the script for the most part, with a smattering of improvisation due to some new ideas we had on site (such as an extra scene where the characters find writing on the walls).

This was quite an interesting experience, as we had full independence with our filming.

Green Screen

As mentioned before, we used the green screen studio for the news report scenes. These were easy enough to shoot and only took a few takes for each of the two scenes.

Off-Site Recording

This was quite an interesting experience, as we had full independence with our filming It felt quite professional, despite our... interesting acting skills and gave me an idea of how filming worked in a real production.

Editing

After we had recorded all the footage the only thing left was to edit it. I had no experience with any of the software used (Adobe After Effects and Premiere), so the project became an interesting learning experience which I ended up enjoying a lot.

The first thing to do was create a news studio. I used different techniques to make this: basic shapes combined with lighting effects were used for the table, and a mixture of a stock photo and some opaque blue squares to make a glass effect. I thought it looked pretty convincing. As well as a classic 'breaking news' banner I also created a text scroll along the bottom using keyframes in Premiere. The choice of software became a problem later, but we'll get to that. I removed the green screen using the keying tools in Premiere, which automatically cut out most of the green, with only minor adjustments required.

The 'mysterious footage' wasn't quite as difficult, and was done fully in Premiere. I tried to make it dark, noisy and unstable, to reinforce the horror theme. I lowered the colour contrast, gave it a grey tint and added noise to make the footage look low quality and amateurish. I used a static effect as both a transition and an effect to create tension as the effects became louder.

Although I enjoyed editing overall, there were a few frustrating points. Syncing the audio and video became tiresome, as my limited experience made it a clunky process that took longer than it should have. I also had unexpected issues with the software itself, which created the problem I mentioned earlier. I had created the news station scenes in After Effects, and put the .aep files directly into the complete Premiere project. This worked fine, until the day the project was due. For an unknown reason, both After Effects files would crash when opened, and showed up as offline on the final video. I couldn't find a solution, so I had to submit the project without the news scenes (and re-made the scenes later).

Reflections

Looking back, I am quite happy with the finished product. I feel the project went surprisingly smoothly and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. This project has given me a good grasp of the basics of Premiere, After Effects and combining different softwares like PhotoShop in a large project. However, there are a few things I feel I would do differently next time:

File management: having never made a project of this size before, my files quickly became messy and it became hard to find certain files due to poor naming and organisation. I've learned the importance of this, and will stick to a consistent naming scheme and clear folders to group similar files in.
Combining softwares: The issue I had with the news scenes would likely not have happened if I had saved these files as .mov files