Effects! (Yeah! I did that!)

Okay, as you should know from my previous blog posts I've expressed an extreme desire to include FX into my short film, as a way to challenge myself and grow as a film maker. Despite the effects being simple, they still bring some difference to the visuals of my film. Special Effects also help to create that "trippy" visual of the psychological thriller genre. To not use visually engaging graphics would not be following my genre conventions.

One major step out of my comfort zone was working with experimenting with a green screen. I knew my editing system, Filmora, had the option for chroma key and after watching a few video tutorials on YouTube I felt like I was ready to give it a go. I bought 6 green posters and taped them up on my wall. I did a few test shots with myself and once I knew it would work I started trying to perfect the lighting. That's when I ran into a couple issues and shadows quickly became my enemy.

After reviewing the handful of test shots I did of my brother I realized he was too red, or there were too many shadows, to he was too tall for my set up. What I did to fix that was crop the videos to make them either Extreme Close Ups or just normal Close Ups. However, I still need to film some more.

In Filmora, you can't edit the coloring of a PIP (picture in picture) when you use chroma key. To get around that and color correct, I simply just loaded the green screen videos into a new project, color corrected them, exported, and then loaded it into my official project. Worked like a charm! Even though the process was really simple it proved to be really cool visually! For the background I just used a gradient that ended up looking like a hallway or a room as opposed to a flat white. When comparing the two I felt as if it was pointless to replace a flat, primary color with another flat, primary color. This however, helped me to create my title!

I was playing around with the effects pre-loaded into my editing system, specifically the overlays. I wasn't even planning to create my title like this. That was until I saw the ink drop overlays and I just HAD to use them. Again, I played around with the colors and was stuck between black, white, and blue for the color of the ink. After comparing them and asking for opinions I thought I would settle on the black, but then of course it was too basic. It was on complete accident when the backdrop for my green screen ended up behind the overlay and I fell in love. I darkened it up slightly so the colors would contrast more and now the opening title has more significance than looking cool.

The final effect that hold significance is the the mirror scenes. I experimented with the masking tool, which essential "masks" part of a video with another video. Yes, once again, being very simplistic yet holding a cool end result. After plenty of trial and error and accidentally bumping the tripod I managed to get a few shots out off this. I used the mirror line as the separating point, which should be pretty obvious. All that was left was to level out the shots of coloring since bathroom lights are definitely temperamental.

So far, I think I've done a pretty good job at stepping out of my comfort zone and from keeping myself from falling into an editing funk. As for challenging myself, it's fair to say that I have been challenged! I enjoyed testing my abilities rather than just sticking to what I know and hope to carry it on into my other films.