21/03 Update - Studio Visit and Collaboration

Yesterday I visited the studio whilst the production team were filming some scenes, to have a look around at their production styles and techniques, and to also talk through some of the work that we're completing together.

The images you can see below are from one of the scenes being shot for 2021. The green placeholder frames are where images will be placed into the environment, given the show the possibility of having animated and alive settings.

After touring the studio, we sat down to discuss some of the scenes I've been working on, as well as the rest of scenes to come. 

One suggestion I made was to add markers to the green placeholders in the sets, enabling me to track the motion of the camera with much more ease. This should reduce the time it will take to establish suitable and realistic tracks within the shots. 

For the apartment scene, the mirror in the room will have interactive adverts on the peripheral. I suggested perhaps fitting the adverts to the circular shape of the mirror, and giving them an intro animation, rather than being on the mirror for the duration of the scene. For example, when a character approaches the mirror the adverts will drop into the mirror, perhaps with a welcome message. This reduces the need to animate the mirror for the entire scene, but also gives an extra level of flourish and visual dynamics. 

There is also a reverse shot of the mirror, which I suggested could do with having a frame around the shot, to infer more clearly to the audience that we are looking back through the mirror. This combined with inverted and limited opacity adverts from the mirror will make it explicitly clear that we are looking through the mirror directly at the character.

The adverts for the mirror are currently being edited and shot, and should be ready to introduced to the scene in the next few days. 

Another area we discussed was the picture frames in the scene, which the writer desired to have a circulating slideshow where pictures moved from one frame to the next. I suggested making 4 compositions of equal length with the pictures changing at regular intervals, the only difference being that the pictures were in a different sequential order in each composition. This means that all 4 frames will have different images at all times, and the images will cycle around the room. This saves playing around with composition timings by simply having 4 separate compositions that achieve the same effect with much less fiddly work. 

In the mean time, some of the final material for the picture frames and eyes has started coming in, meaning the placeholder tracks can be replaced, and the graphic edits can start looking closer to the finished product.

Here's a sneak peek at the number of tracks that the scenes are starting to accrue. 

I anticipate that each scene will have a huge number of tracking nulls, each with their own challenge and problems to overcome, whether it's being obscured or out of focus. 

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