Preface This book documents the LA story of the Leisure Walk through various neighborhoods. The book is designed, first, to introduce the 2-minute film and second, to explain the techniques and tool employed to make it. The purpose of this book is to illustrate our film making process and the result. We would like to thank our professors Natasha Sandmeier and Nathan Su for their excellent guidance and support during the process. We would also like to thank Tyson Phillips, Saul Alvarez and our fellow classmates, without whose cooperation this film would not have been possible.
Alekya Malladi | Negin Nayeri
A LEISURE WALK LA Story | Project 01 ENTERTAINMENT STUDIO 2019-20 | UCLA AUD
“Every film should have its own world, a logic and feel to it that expands beyond the exact image that the audience is seeing.� Christopher Nolan
Table of Contents
Thesis Statment LA is a vibrant city that has so much to offer yet we are confined by the delays, the traffic, the crowd and the confusion. Our project explores composite realities by filming physical spaces and digitally stitching them together. By doing so, we ignore the chaos, creating a continuous path between distinct surroundings, creating limitless connections whilst chasing the horizon.
As you step out, imagine a world where you do not have to commute through the bustling hive of the city, where a door leads you from one reality to another in a moment, where leisure walk links discontinuous locations into alternate realities, creating the illusion of a single journey.
“Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.� Immanuel Kant
Preliminary Story Board
Scene 01: Starts in a dark room
Scene 02: Dark room with a black door, light from behind is visible through the Scene 03: Door opens into a tunnel with wine pouring in (the tunnels openings. were used to smuggle wine into the brewery during the prohibition era)
Scene 04: The hidden door behind King Eddie’s magnificent fire door mural opens...
Scene 05: Into a speakeasy on the fIoor above
Scene 06: The door opens into a street in Downtown Los Angeles
Scene 07: Camera moves fast. The portal opens into another neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles
Scene 08: Another portal appears at the end of the street
Scene 09: Angel City Brewery
Scene 10: The Murals of the city appear on the surfaces
Scene 11: The room spins 180 degrees
Scene 12: The beach and the sun
Scene 12: The beach and the sand
Scene 12: The sun and the ocean
Scene 12: Ariel View of the city
Locations Chinatown Chinatown is a destination in the city of Los Angeles for dining and shopping. Pagoda-style buildings with red lanterns house traditional Chinese restaurants, dim sum houses and bakeries, plus specialty grocery stores and gift shops.
Fashion District The Los Angeles Fashion District is a design, warehouse, and distribution nexus of the clothing, accessories and fabric industry in Downtown Los Angeles.
Flower Market The Los Angeles Flower District is the premiere wholesale L.A. flower market resource for flower growers, shippers, suppliers, floral wholesalers, distributors, floral designers, event planners and retail florists.
Spring Arcade 1924 arcade building in the heart of downtownand with a glass-roofed alleyway dotted offering variety of restaurants and shops.
LACMA Centrally located between the beach and downtown Los Angeles, LACMA features artwork covering the expanse of art history and the globe.
Culver City Hotel The Culver Hotel is a national historical landmark in downtown Culver City, California. It was built by Harry Culver, the founder of Culver City, and opened on September 4, 1924, with local headlines announcing: “City packed with visitors for opening of Culver skyscraper.�
Sculpture Garden - UCLA The Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden was found in 1967 and it is one of the most comprehensive sculpture gardens in the United States.
Royce Hall - UCLA A symbol of both intellectual and artistic excellence, Royce Hall stands as a monument to UCLA’s rich cultural past and future.
Venice Pier Beach The Venice Pier Beach is at the long fishing pier jutting out into the Pacific Ocean from the Venice District of Los Angeles.
Behind the Scenes
Masking, Keying and Green Screens After visiting various neighborhoods of Los Angeles and collecting footage, we experimented with different cameras, to understand how to use them. The experiments also included training with various gimbals to get smooth transitions. These included the DJI Osmo mobile phone stabilizer, handheld Camera stabilizer and Moza air 2. The footages were shot on an iPhone, Huawei P20, Nikon, Panasonic and the Black Magic Camera. Through these experiments, the transitions between a digital space and the physical world were made possible. These transitions made us question the possibility of believing a digital world to be real. On the other hand, it was interesting to note the illusion created by joining the spaces in the IDEAS campus. Where one door opens into an unexpected space, the transition between them seems surreal.
The footage was shot inside the IDEAS campus using a gimbal to test stability, sturdiness and the smoothness of the transition
A digital door was created and animated in Autodesk Rhino and Maya with a green screen behind it The scene opens from the seminar room into a private office space
The green screen was then removed in Adobe After Effects
Using keylight and mask techniques, the space behind the door is masked by setting keys on every frame
The exhibition space at the IDEAS campus, UCLA is added behind the door
The experiment was done to understand the transition between a digital realm and a physical space
The exhibition space is then added to it, creating the effect of a continuous space.
Camera Tracking By tracking the video on Adobe After Effects, we were able to generate points to track and place a surface that would could act as the portal to the next scene. This test was successful in placing a surface and tracking it, however, it was challenging to add a door and transition into the next scene.
Inspired by Daniel crook’s subtle knife, we experimented with tracking the video and placing a portal to a different scene. This helped us understand how scenes must be connected, the importance of matching perspectives and the relationship between interior and exterior spaces. Locations: Flower District and Chinatown
Viewing Film and RAW The Blackmagic Cinema Camera is better than a simple video camera because it has professional features which allowed us to get footage in 4K resolution. The combination of high dynamic range, great low light performance and Blackmagic RAW gave the film footage with precise tones and gorgeous organic colors. The videos were then edited and color corrected in DaVinci Resolve. Blackmagic RAW is a visually lossless codec. This means that the footage gets compressed into a vastly smaller data set that will later decode into a visually identical image to the uncompressed data. The RAW codec had greater image quality, bit depth, dynamic range, and control of the footage. Films like Logan (2017), Don’t Breathe (2016) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) are few of the movies which have been shot using this technology. However, filming outdoors proved quite challenging due to the weight of the equipment and the low battery life, which lasted around thirty to forty minutes. Screenshot of RAW footage
Footage Edited and Color corrected on DaVinci Resolve
Footage Edited and Color corrected on DaVinci Resolve
Making of the Fiction Motion Tracking and Scene Transitions
The video is imported into Cinema4D for motion tracking.
The auto features aided in placing the ground plane on which the object would be placed.
The camera was tracked and solved to generate auto features.
The black door is created and placed on the plane created. A proportionate box is also created behind the swing of the door.
The succeeding scene is added as a material to the box. The scene is key framed to play at the exact moment the door opens.
Light and shadow are applied enhance the material enable reflections on the door.
The Door The door is a monolithic structure that the viewer can see throughout the film. What does the door open into? It aids in transitioning through unrelated scenes, creating the illusion of a continuous journey between disparate worlds. It’s a refIective black door which opens as we get closer to it. What’s strange about it? It doesn’t cast any shadows. It starts to blur the difference between the real and the digital worlds. As we open each door, we are moving ahead in time and space, recreating a glimpse of the past.
References
The Subtle Knife Daniel Crooks Three-dimensional reality can be manipulated, and sometimes it’s radically unstable, as when a sinkhole suddenly opens and drains a lake. Artist Daniel Crooks likes to manipulate reality with digital technology. The tapering perspective of railway and tramlines carry us into an array of strange places that constantly change though the rails never do. A German television station used to run, from midnight to 6am every day, film taken from the front of a train going from Cologne to Berlin. The peculiar fascination of this was the ever-present tracks tapering into the distance. Australian artist Daniel Crooks’ art films have the same effect, but the focus has shifted from documentary reality to art by complicating the situation of those tapering lines in a variety of compelling ways. He continues his exploration of composite realities, in which he films cinematic simulations of the physical world, which he digitally manipulates to create collaged landscapes with endless vanishing points. The Subtle Knife begins on train tracks, and it is on the tracks that this reality travels at a slow-motion pace. The new video begins as if the viewer is emerging backwards out of a window or door. The various landscapes of The Subtle Knife all lie along railroad tracks—the countryside, a train station, a seaside route, and so on. The result is that 3D reality—time and space—gets compressed and collaged into a two-dimensional replica, and it’s the slow travel that makes it a truly mesmerizing experience. Suddenly they pass through to new situations, under dimly seen bridges and other contexts, making an ever-changing vision with the tracks as the ultimate reality. Crooks have used a myriad of techniques from building his own programmable dolly to a variety of filming techniques to slice the notion of time. In the Subtle Knife, viewers are driven into the future through a portal while passing through the present time. Using the techniques Crooks has talked about in an interview, summarizes perfectly how changes in the urban environment can be recorded, contrasting between what stood before and now. It is important as architectural photographers to think beyond the notion of creating beautiful imagery. We also need to consider the implications of architecture within our communities as well as creating awareness of these implications in our work through a medium which should not be limited to photography.
References and Sources The Subtle Knife, Daniel Crooks • https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11692684 • https://vimeo.com/178430917 • https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vvy9w3/time-3d-landscapes-and-digital-collage • https://apalmanac.com/commentary/documenting-urban-fabric-5627 Black Magic Camera • https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/what-is-blackmagic-raw/ Images from Page 02-03 • https://www.businessinsider.com/california-los-angeles-manhattan-beach-best-places-to-live-2018-3 • https://www.10best.com/destinations/california/los-angeles/nightlife/best-nightlife/ • https://californiathroughmylens.com/grand-central-market • https://www.tripsavvy.com/movies-set-in-grand-central-terminal-2286492 • https://blogmickey.com/2018/02/extra-magic-hours-scheduled-daily-july-hollywood-studios-duetoy-story-land-crowds/ • https://www.tripsavvy.com/los-angeles-garment-district-4120763 • https://la.curbed.com/2019/9/17/20870590/expo-line-crowding-service-cuts-ridership • https://laist.com/2019/07/02/best_and_worst_days_to_commute_on_la_freeways.php • https://therealdeal.com/la/2017/04/19/park-between-chinatown-and-la-river-to-open-after-16-yearwait/ • https://stayinglevel.com/los-angeles/blog/category/la-neighborhoods/ • https://m45t1g05.blogspot.com/2017/03/mage-2-dethroned-queen-la-north-south.html • https://www.victoryhouselondon.com/en/china-town • https://www.thesanteealley.com/disclaimer/ • http://moonimgs.pw/flower-market-los-angeles-hours.html • http://www.schwartzeventphoto.com/l.a.conservancy-.html • https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/15/labor-day-getaways-sparking-record-air-travel.html
Locations • https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+of+California,+Los+Angeles/@34.079901,-118.4 433817,11.85z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x80c2bc85f05c0f65:0x25a993585c134837!8m2!3d34.068921! 4d-118.4451811 • https://roycehall.org/ • https://hammer.ucla.edu/collections/franklin-d-murphy-sculpture-garden • http://www.culverhotel.com/ • https://www.lacma.org/ • https://www.timeout.com/los-angeles/attractions/spring-arcade-building • http://fashiondistrict.org/explore/fabrics-notions/ • https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/things-to-do/the-guide-to-chinatown-in-los-angeles