The Rough Cut

Before progressing further with the modelling of my 3D scenes and assets, I put together a rough edit with my collected footage:


This edit focuses on the timings of each shot and sound placement. The timings will be useful when animating the 3D elements to correspond with the length of the shots. This means I am not spending time animating what would be cropped out in the final composition. Also, the consideration of the sound composition at this early stage will mean I am not scrambling for sounds at the last minute, which  often tends to happen when focusing on the visual side of things and neglecting the equally as imported audio elements. For the final shot I used the same sounds from my after effects moving composition. The other sounds were a mix of online clips and recordings from the original shoot.

As you can see, the final green screen shot was fairly straight forward when it came to shooting. Our filming group had two redhead lights shining through dampeners to illuminate a green screen cloth. With another group member I then held some green screen silk over the actor hiding most of his body. In hindsight, there were a few different approaches I could have taken. I will likely be masking right up to the actors neck when compositing, meaning the green screen will only be relevant around the head. With this in mind, I could have potentially set up the small pop out green screen and grabbed a close-up shot of the actors head, to then scale down to size in After Effects. With our group setting up the large green screen cloth anyway, this wouldn't have saved any time, but is something to be aware of in the future.

I feel with the rough cut completed, I can can now begin animating as soon as possible.

I felt it would be interesting to have a look at the pre visualisation or 'previs' process at a professional industry level. The video below shows how  3D pre visualisation was used for 'X-Men: First Class'. A devoted team incorporate 3D animation tools such as motion capture to clan out the framing of shots, prior to filming. Perhaps it could have interesting to produce a 3D mock-up as a group to inform the framing our shots in advanced: