The Kite Production Diary

Production Diary Name: Hiu Tung Karen Law Student ID: 11041177

Research

Based on my role in the group, I explored more in these ideas.

Film Editing To me, editing is always an abstract thing. People always say that editing is choreography. Editors must have strong senses of timing and pacing, know how to create a rhythm, tension and release for the film. So how can I learn to build up that sense? Many would say that’s your experience in editing. This is just so board. Karen Pearlman wrote a book about shaping the film edit. I agreed with Pearlman that most editors would say, “It’s intuitive”. But she brings out some points about building up a good expertise on editing, like watching more films, doing detailed research to have a thorough understanding of the material and story and learning to see the potential of movements and moments before they are shaped. To be short, that means editors need time to develop his/her experience. Even if we talk about creativity, combining different images, sounds and movements can create new and coherent meanings, practices seem to be the most important in training editors.

Pearlman also mentions that music is very important in films, she said “The composer makes up the music and its rhythms, whereas an editor doesn’t exactly makes up anything up.” I agree that music is important, but is it more important than editing? I think music can help create emotions, enhance the rhythm created by editing.

Even though editing looks like choreography, but the main difference is choreographers often work with abstract movements, but editors always work with naturalistic movements. And they have to maintain the continuity of movements. Pearlman mentions some technical words like pulse that makes up rhythm of the film. I believe it’s just like a human body, the speed of pulse can affect the whole body system. The rhythm of the film affects audience’s emotions, I think this relates to storytelling. Another one is movement phrases. In the book she says, “…are compositions of movement into perceptible and intentionally formed rhythmically expressive sequences.” I believe she’s talking about how to shape movements, how to make them smooth enough that audience doesn’t notice there is editing in it.

Pearlman mentions many theories of editing, like how to build up good sense of timing and pacing, how to create physical and emotional rhythm. They are not a recipe that I can follow in every editing of films.

Rotoscoping My main reference is Richard Linklater, a director who directed two rotoscoping films, Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006).

In my research, I know Flat Black Films, the studio that made the rotoscoping animation of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. The team used Rotoshop to do the animation, but they said on the website that they don’t plan to publish the software. As a result, I used the basic method, which I first edited the sequence, rendered the sequence in After Effects to make a JPEG sequence, then trace every frame in Photoshop, put them together in After Effects.

I watched the films. Take Waking Life as an example, Waking Life is about an unnamed young man in a persistent dream-­‐like state that eventually progresses to lucidity. The protagonist feels trapped by his perpetual dream, broken up only by unending false awakenings. His final conversation with a dream character reveals that reality may be only a single instant that the individual consciousness interprets falsely as time until a level of understanding is achieved that may allow the individual to break free from the illusion.

This film touches on some philosophical topics like existentialism. The protagonist initially observes and later participated in philosophical discussions of issues such as reality, the relationship of the subject with others and the meaning of life.

Since the whole film is about philosophy, animation seems good to be used to illustrate this kind of narration. Animations use different illusions, effects, imaginations and colours that visualize the mysterious and abstract theories or ideas of philosophy. When I considered how to deal with the dream part in the film, I knew rotoscoping should be good to present this scenario. Also on technical side, since I’m not good at aniamtions, rotoscoping is something I could achieve in a short time, even the process of production was time-­‐consuming.

Besides, I think rotoscoping animation works better with real-­‐action films, maybe it’s because rotoscoping animation is a real-­‐action video before it’s changed to animation. In our film, the animation would be immerged in the film, I tried to maintain the unite style in the whole film.

Colours in the film How I can bring out the style of the film? At the beginning, I brought out the idea of making a film in 90s. There are a couple of reasons why I wanted to have 90s style. One is because of the plots in the film. I think playing kites is most popular in 90s. It’s not easy to find kids playing kites nowadays. Also, this film is about dad and his son. The writer may disagree with me, but to me, I got a feeling that retro colours are suitable to talk about relationships between a man and a boy.

Maybe it’s because men seldom share their feelings obviously. You would notice our film got the less dialogue among all the other films. Since the film got few dialogue, visualizations on the images become important. Using 90s colour style would be an interesting artificial element in the film.

In production, I know it’s impossible to make a ‘real 90s film’ as I know the production would be very difficult, as even though the actors could dress like 90s, it’s so hard to recreate all the scenes in 90s, especially when we had shooting outside studio or house. Thus I tried to create the style in post-­‐ production.

Even there are books and essays on film that explore the meaning of colour, I would hesitate to give them too much weight. The meanings of colours vary greatly between cultures, and even between films by the same director. Take red colour as example, it means something quite different in China than it does in America, it has potential to mean anything at all. Sometimes the director has a personal colour scheme that persists between films. Sometimes that’s not the case.

Thus, sometimes I hesitate whether I should make the rule like ‘this colour = this emotion’. Emphasizing the flexibility of colour, and recognize that each movie constructs its own language of colour to a greater or lesser extent, and you’ll be on to something.

Anyway, I watched some films, tried to get an idea and reference on colour grading of our film. Our film has a ‘dark’ background. It doesn’t mean negative, but the atmosphere and scenarios are quite sad and a bit moody. So on my research on colour grading reference, most of the films I found are crime or psychological thriller films, like Traffic (2000), Taxi Driver (1976) and Natural Born Killer (1994).

In our film, the first two scenes (the pub scene and the car scene), the colour grading reference is from Taxi Driver, with reddish and brownish colours.

Natural Born Killer: the colour green is used to indicate the sickness in Mickey (Main character)’s mind and shows up prominently several times during the film, like the green neon at the drugstore (left) and the green room in the prison (right).

Traffic is a good example of the director using post processing effects to change the colour of the scene in order to influence mood. All the scenes shot in Mexico have a hazy yellow look while all the scenes shot in Wakefield have a blue tone. This achieves a distinctive look for each different vignette in the story.

What I did in the whole production process.

Pre-­production

Before the shooting, my main responsibility was to think of the style of the film.

The first draft of the logo for title sequence.

This typography became the title sequence of the film and my group mate, Mark Toh produced the animation.

I did some test on my idea that making a ‘90s-­‐like’ film. I did tests in Colour in Final Cut Studio and After Effects. I chose After Effects at last, as I found out the

‘Tritone’ effect quite useful to our film. It brings brownish and yellowish feeling to the film that I most wanted to put in the film.

My first idea of rotoscoping animation and its style.

The scenario is in Tommy’s dream, he stays happily together with his parents.

They are all in the park with a large grass field and Tommy’s playing the kite.

Then Tommy’s parents are suddenly gone, when Tommy tries to look for his parents, his kite flies away and gradually becomes a seagull flying in the sky. And the seagull arrives at Tommy’s house (in front of the window) and the scene goes back to reality and the film goes on.

The whole animation consist mainly two parts, the park sequence and the seagull sequence. As our group plan to film the park sequence, so I can first edit the sequence and then trace directly on the edit to make rotoscoping animation.

Since it is hard to film a seagull flying on the sky, I looked for seagull videos online and take reference on them. I believe the hardest part will be the kite changing to a seagull, flying to in front of the window of Tommy’s room, then the whole scene goes back to reality. I can do tracing on the park sequence and the seagull sequence, but I have to animate the transition (from kite to seagull) frame by frame.

The reason why I want to use animation to tell the story of this scene is mainly because it’s Tommy’s imaginary dream. This animation acts like a montage sequence. Tommy can’t achieve this in reality, therefore he uses the dream to escape from reality and tries to recreate his own ideal world in the dream.

Style I thought of two styles that I’m able to do it. The first one is using silhouettes.

The silhouette work I did before.

Using shadows was the first idea in drafting the script. In the narrative part, I think shadows give a scene of loneliness. The whole film is about ‘lost communications’. Tommy doesn’t have a good relationship between him and his dad. What I thought was when a person is alone, shadow is something that always stay with him/her. Playing around with shadows seems to be a good metaphor to show Tommy’s loneliness. If shadows were used heavily in the film, I wanted to use silhouettes in the animation to match the style of the film.

Another idea is rotoscoping. I got the idea from Juno’s opening credit sequence.

This cartoon style seems suitable to be used in Tommy’s dream, which is childish and dramatic.

Left: Juno Opening Credit Sequence. Right: My test on Juno style.

I have done another kind of rotoscoping, which looks more like watercolour style.

Tracing the seagull frame by frame using Photoshop.

Seagull rotoscoping test 01

Seagull rotoscoping test 02

Even though Juno style looks more realistic, I think the watercolour style suits more to the animation as the animation is about Tommy’s imaginary world. It should be childish and simple.

I got another idea that is completely not related to the seagull narration. I thought of water bubbles.

Water bubble animation test

Why did I want to use water bubbles?

I thought of Tommy’s ‘imagination world’. He always tries to use the kite to bring his wishes to the sky, where he believes the Lord is there. So he always wants to use something that can go up high to the sky. I thought of kids playing blowing bubbles. The bubbles will go out high into the sky. Then I got an idea that if I applied this in the story, the metaphor would become Tommy likes to play blowing bubbles, as he believes the bubbles would bring his wishes to the Lord, but he knows it’ll never come true as the bubbles will eventually burst. This is quite sad but I think this narrative would work well. Then in the animation, there will be many water bubbles in Tommy’s dream. Each bubble contains one scene which Tommy’s good memories with his parents.

Blowing bubbles

But I didn’t use this idea at the end, the main reason is if water bubble idea was used, the meaning of the kite in the film would become useless, as there would be two main elements interact with Tommy. And director wanted to keep the kite idea. So I didn’t do any further development on this water bubble idea later on.

On usage of colours and camera angles in the animation, I will take reference from the storyboard of the films. Actually the sequence will be filmed in reality except the sequence of the kite changing to a seagull that finally lands and reaches in front of window of Tommy’s room. So I can trace the actual footage to make the rotoscoping animation.

In the installation, I participated in interaction design. Since I didn’t get much experience in interaction design, I was looking for something simple while it can deliver my idea.

I choose mobile phones as interactive device, the main reason is because it’s so convenient, easy to use and there are many people have got a smart phone now.

And it’s easier for me to do testing and to examine more on the design.

The first idea of the interaction design

The diary will reveal the background and some of the past events of Albert and his wife, who passed away because of a disease. Instead of words and photo, the whole diary will full of codes, so it looks like a book with lots of secrets. The codes used are from a software called SnapDragonAR. The principle of this technology is similar to that of QR codes. When the software is opened on a laptop with a camera, then a card/book with the codes on is put in front of the camera. People will see the photos/videos projected on the card on the computer

screen. So when audience put Albert’s diary in front of the camera of the laptop, they’ll know what happened to Albert and his feelings on the events.

I found a problem later on, which SnapDragonAR is only available on trial version. But I found another application called Aurasma. Basically it runs on mobiles and user can project images, videos or animation on the objects they want the media to be projected on.

I did a test on Aurasma. I tried to assign a seagull rotoscoping animation on a card. At first I tried this on an android phone. Since the ‘Aura’ (a file that saves the data of pairings of assigned objects) is just for individual use, so I have to share it online. People see the links online, then use their mobile devices (with Aurasma) to open the links, then the ‘Auras’ will be download and saved in their devices. This is the principle of how Aurasma works.

Even though I use Aurasma at the end. The design of interactions in Albert’s diary is almost the same as if I use SnapDragonAR. Actually I think Aurasma is slightly better as it runs on mobile devices that are more convenient than SnapDragonAR, which just runs on laptops.

Some links on websites introducing interactive media applications: Aurasma http://www.aurasma.com/

Layar http://www.layar.com/

AppFurnace http://www.appfurnace.com/

SnapDragonAR http://www.futurestories.ca/snapdragonar/

Process

As we couldn’t borrow the car mount for the car scene, we decided to do the car scene in front of green screen and to do the keying in post-­‐production. Since that car scene is a raining scene as well, I tried hard to recreate raindrops in post-­‐ production. In fact, we used a water pump to pour water on the car while we were filming, instead of doing the effects in post-­‐production. However, when I imported the footage in After Effects and started doing the keying process. After the keying and colour correction, the raindrops on the glass are hardly to be seen. I tried to add raindrops, but because of limited compositing skills, the result was not as good as I thought. Thus I decided not to add raindrops in the post-­‐production.

Raindrop test in After Effects.

Colour correction

Of course I won’t use those extreme colour tone for our film, but I think colour correction is essential in our film. On the day of screening and presentation, I noticed that our film seems to have massive colour corrections. Also, our film got the less dialogue among all the films.

Since I want the film to be looked ‘old’ and ‘dark’, I added quite a lot of grey and sepia colours, to make the shots look brownish and pale. I increased the black areas in the shots, lowered the hue saturation of any shape colours like red and orange. The shots in the house, I added blue colours so as to create a ‘cold and lonely’ atmosphere in the house.

The old film effect I added to the final film.

I did the colour grading in After Effects.

Keying process

Even though it was not my first time to do keying in After Effects, this is the most complicated keying I did so far. There were quite a lot of problems during the time we had filming in front of the green screen. I think the main problem should be the lights. Since it was raining at that day, we set up the green screen inside a garage, where the light was not sufficient for keying. Later on, we changed the set up outside the garage. It was easier to set up the scene, but the light was still

insufficient. So when the footage entered After Effects, it became very dark and if I increased the brightness artificially, the noise grain came out and the quality of film would be decreased. That’s why the car scene looks quite dark. I know that scene doesn’t look good technically. If you look closely to Neil, you may notice there is noise grain on his face. The reflections on the glass were not perfect as well. But fortunately I could mange to match the colour grading between the scene before and after. It’s not the best chroma key, but it’s the best I could do.

Keying: Before and After

1. Original footage 2. Keying 3. Adding reflections 4. After colour correction

Masking in After Effects

Setting up green screen inside the garage.

Rotoscoping Animation

Rotoscoping animation in After Effects.

Tracing the seagull (it lands in front of the window of Tommy’s room) frame by frame.

It was my first time to do rotoscoping animation. I think one of the difficulties in producing the animation is how I could combine the animation with real-­‐action film. In fact, I quite like the idea that animation is used to represent Tommy’s dream. There is a narrative in the film that seagulls represent freedom, which Tommy really wants. He makes wishes on the kite and flies it up high in the sky, as he believes what his dad said, that Lord would know the wishes when he sees the kite.

Therefore in the animation, I tried to create a kite changing to a seagull flying in the sky. This is a metaphor that the kite represents Tommy’s wishes and freedom. What I think of Tommy is a quite boy, who seldom expresses his feelings because of the relationship with his dad. I tried to deliver Tommy’s thoughts using this animation. This part would actually help the narrative part of the story later on, which is when Tommy wakes up from the dream and tries to catch the seagulls. And in the part when his dad punishes Tommy, he hears some sounds from the window. He thinks it’s the seagull in his dream knocking at the window.

I heard many of us said in the presentation, that if we got more time, we could do better. I know it’s an excuse but it’s true. I quite like the animation, but I’m not satisfied with it. I really want to animate the kite’s shape changing to the flying seagull, but not just adding a dissolve effect as a transition. And there are many flaws in the part when the seagull landing in front of the window. The animation of seagull landing is not smooth as well, it looks like special effects in early times.

Others said it looks like the owl in the film Clash of the Titans. It’s a bit sad to know it but that’s true.

The owl Bubo in the film Clash of the Titans (1981)

In the installation, my application Arusma is used in Tommy’s book at the end. I did 13 animations, each of them has a transition which changes the illustration from black and white to colour. Since the illustrations are black and white in Tommy’s book, when audience put their mobile phones on the illustrations, the coloured illustrations will be revealed in the phones. This idea is similar to my first idea which something is hid until audience use phones to see the truth.

Actually this idea worked quite well when I did testing, but unfortunately not all the animations worked with Arusma, so I had to use QR codes as a backup solution. When audience scan the QR codes, they will go to YouTube and the animations are on YouTube.

In the whole project, I can describe myself as a ‘technician’, because my main contribution was in post-­‐production. I did the final compositing of the film. The final rendering of this film was far more complicated than I thought, as our film has massive colour corrections, keying and animations. Furthermore, the whole group suffered from many difficulties either in production or communication in the group.

Bibliography

Books: Karen Pearlman , Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit, Focal Press, 2009 Websites: Rotoscoping [online]. 4 May 2012. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping [Accessed on 12 May 2012]

Richard Linklater [online]. 30 April 2012. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Linklater [Accessed on 12 May 2012]

Flat Black Films [online] Available from: http://www.flatblackfilms.com/Flat_Black_Films/Home.html [Accessed on 12 May 2012]

1988 Bubo [online] Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzKhqt5IRnM [Accessed on 12 May 2012]

Clash of the Titans (1981 film) [online]. 12 May 2012. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_the_Titans_(1981_film) [Accessed on 12 May 2012]

Journals: Anonymous (unknown year) What Does Rain Mean Symbolically? blurt it, available at: http://www.blurtit.com/q857362.html [Accessed on 14 May 2012]

Blake, Robin (2008) Narratives of colour and light. The Financial Times, August, available at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/553a1d88-­‐5f64-­‐11dd-­‐91c0-­‐ 000077b07658.html#axzz1utslL6s6 [Accessed on 12 May 2012]

Filmography: Natural Born Killers (1994) Wikipedia [online]. 14 May 2012. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Born_Killers [Accessed 15 May 2012]

Taxi Driver (1976) Wikipedia [online]. 13 May 2012. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_Driver [Accessed 15 May 2012]

Traffic (2000) Wikipedia [online]. 12 May 2012. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_(2000_film) [Accessed 15 May 2012]

Waking Life (2001) Wikipedia [online]. 15 May 2012. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life [Accessed 15 May 2012]