Editing

I decided that I wanted to build on my editing skills by working with After Effects for this film. I mostly figured out what I needed to do at each stage by transferring my skills with Premiere Pro and Photoshop software. However for the things I didn’t know I researched into them online and in a great instructional book Adobe After Effects CC: Visual Effects and Compositing. This told me much more specific techniques and how exactly to create certain effects with your film footage.

I think the greatest tools I learned about was that of Roto Brush which I could use to select the body form of a puppet to work on rig removal in a more accurate and fast way than editing frame by frame or using masks. However there were quite a few shots that it simple did not work with my footage being that it detects the contrasts to select a shape out of the background and my film uses single tones for the majority of my footage. This tool still worked it simply took more editing than a more clear film would do.

I also learnt a great deal about lighting and shadows to produce these within my film. Being that the light through the holes in the walls are a really important part of my film and the story it needs to be edited in accurately. This was done through creating rays of light using Fractal Noise Tool to fracture specks on the masked colour layer. I then would use a CC Light Rays tool to add the source of light that would be ‘beamed’ from.

With the editing I split the shots and scenes that I had animated into 5 larger scenes to break the film up into workable parts and not have too much (or little) to edit and render for each part. Overall there was a lot of rig removal as many of my shots being full body ones with my puppets so this was the largest part of this post-production stage. This is something I am very used to working with and so the process mostly a series of repeated methods whether I used Roto Brush Tool or masks.

There was also a lot of greenscreen work to edit out with the different lands lighting as backgrounds to many shots as this would have been difficult to reproduce within the studio. These were edited using Keylight (1.2) tool, another tool I am used to using with Premiere Pro so was another matter of adapting my skills for this software.

Overall this post-production editing stage worked out well, although time consuming and there are parts that I would like to improve further upon I got the shots edited and looking how I planned with a clean and professional finish to the film.