Helena Masterson

I have been chosen to be part of an event called ‘7 days in June’ which started on Saturday at Media City. Its an event that involves a production team making seven videos in seven days about freelancing. This is to help promote freelancing and expel any preconceived ideas as to what it is and has been backed by PCG and Brookson.

My involvement is to collaborate with a number of other chosen students and graduates, who all have various creative backgrounds, and produce the ‘making of 7 days in June’ film as the seventh film. My role is Editor and Video Producer which is great as it gives me a real insight on the process of film production from start to finish. 

So far I have loved every second of what we have been doing. We have been given full creative freedom and have been storyboarding and planning what to capture on film. Today was the start of us filming the production crew (who where filming the video for the other six films). I’m very excited to see what our finished film will be like and am looking forward to editing the footage.

To find out more about the event, visit www.7daysinjune.com

This is the final outcome for the BBC TV bus brief. 

Below is the synopsis we wrote for the brief and it explains our ideas and processes.

Synopsis - BusTV - By Helena Masterson & Brett de Beaufre-Apps

When the brief was set to make a motion picture to be screened on the QuaysLink Bus in Salford, we were very excited about getting some of our work out there and getting it seen. 

We have worked together many times in the past and it made sense that if we wanted to create anything that was a good representation of our skills, it would be good for us to work together. Our combined work ethic is very intense and we manage to complete a lot when we are together. We find bouncing ideas off of each other very easy and it allows us to come up with some really good concepts. 

We had been wanting to try making a time-lapse video for a while and this project seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it. We roughly story boarded our idea with the view that we might need to tweak it at a later stage. Our concept started as using moving GIF’s of people doing various activities but we then decided to use two mischievous balls of light that chase each other around Salford Quays. This idea has a hidden metaphor within it where each light is meant to represent each of us. They interact with each other and bounce off of each other as we do when we are working together.

We researched how best to shoot time lapse videos and even bought iPhone applications and an intervalometer which allowed us to create a far smoother time-lapse and made experimenting much easier. We decided that it would look best if we took the pictures with a wide angle lens as they create much nicer looking landscapes. One difficulty that we did run into was getting the film speed right when using the wide angle lens as the sky kept coming out grainy. But after some tweaking we managed to correct it. So after our trial night where we made a few errors and mistakes we set off on our actual night time photography session from sunset till 3am. Some 11,500 pictures later we were ready to import the photos into final cut and see our time-lapse for the very first time.

We then exported each scene from final cut and re-imported them into After Effects. We were then ready to animate on top of our scenes. One of our concerns when animating the balls of light is that they wouldn’t look realistic unless the cast reflections in the buildings and other surrounding objects. So after a night of trawling the Internet looking for a good tutorial on how to make balls of light that reflect light off of their surrounding objects, we found a very detailed video on the process (http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/3d_light_casting/).

We followed the video carefully. We animated a ball in 3D and gave it a feathered glow with light rays emitting from it. We then had to create a 3D plane layer on top of our time-lapse footage and created a light and light source layer above it. We then had to add our light ball on top of that and motion track them all so that they all move together. The most frustrating part of this was getting the 3D plane to sit in a believable position above the water for the reflections to show up on. Manipulating the camera to the right angle and not rotating the actual plane was extremely difficult as the camera position is extremely sensitive and if the plane was rotated the lights wouldn’t look right in the world space. We then had to ensure that both of the lights and all of their counterparts were oriented towards the camera otherwise they wouldn’t look 3D. We then rendered each scene out again and imported them back into final cut to do the final edit and insert our end scene with our email addresses on. 

After all of our efforts we found that we lost a lot of quality from our first export from final cut and the skies in each scene have become quite pixelated which has detracted from the realistic feel of the video. We played around with the settings in final cut and have been able to bring back some of the quality but it still does pixelate slightly. In hindsight we would have been better off if we had kept all the settings at their maximum and brought it all down at the end once we had finished it all.