Documentary Tests (Carried On)

This week, I've been testing many different shots that will go towards the film.

The first tests carried on from the silhouette shots I was working on last week, however I'm now starting to animate them. I used a better camera, and this time captured the forest in four individual sections. 

I animated each of these four layers ever so minutely (by lightly blowing on the moss) to create the effect of wind. In After Effects, these layers were combined together, the lighting darkened and put a background behind. This concept will form the start of the documentary. 

I then looked into creating the fire effects that will be overlaid onto the scene representing the deforestation taking place. This shot will appear midway through the documentary. The oil tests that Daisy did were a good starting point for making this effect (as seen below).

I went about trying to recreate the oil effect here so I could film it instead of just capturing the one photograph of it. This turned out to be very hard to do, and neither of us could recreate the patterns in the photo above. The oil mixture was creating patterns that were too bubbly/separating into small circles. I also played around with having a direct light in the reflection or a flat light across the whole surface. 

I composited these oil shots on top of the backdrops of the scenes I'd been making, with varying degrees of success. 

The red lines are nice and look like a plume of heat but it's too subtle overall/doesn't look like fire.

The colours are more realistic and the forest is a good colour. The yellow flickering is effective, but overall is too slow and again too subtle. 

The oil here is very effective (looking like embers) and its colour is vivid. The added animation with the falling tree gives a lot of emphasis to the power of the fire. The blur conveys the heat.

The final test involved smoke (made of cotton wool) rising from the scene. An animated plume of smoke also rises into the air when the tree falls down. Overall, it just needs some lighting added to the trees to make the two elements really feel connected.

The next test I did involved building up the stop-motion forest set from multiple layers. 

This shot combines eight or so layers of forest that get darker and blurrier the further you go back to build up perspective.

This shot includes the palm oil that takes over.

This is the animated version, combining the forest with the weaving tests made a few weeks back. I really like this effect and believe it looks very natural. (This will appear midway through the documentary, when the message about palm oil starts to twist negatively).

Finally I tested the panning shot that we were going to include at the beginning of the film. I stuck to my initial design to carry out this shot.

The first video is a quick practise shot using my camera, mainly for testing whether the layers green-screened behind would look realistic being inserted afterwards in post-production. 

Despite how rough it is, I was very pleased with how it turned out.

I tried the same shot again, but this time using the stop-motion software and taking individual photos rather than a film. Overall I wasn't as pleased with this attempt as it is very jolty, although it's cleaner than the previous attempt. I will continue working on this next week.

What Went Well

• I got to a good solution for representing the fire in the forest, using oil in water
• Cotton wool in combination with the oil made the fire even more realistic
• The combination of the weaving green paper and the layered forest works really well

Criticism

• Some of the tests have felt slow and not all that rewarding (when they haven't worked out), but in the long run will improve the documentary.
• More work needs to be done on the panning shot
• It was impossible to get the oil patterns to look exactly like they had done the first time around