Experimental Media: Final film and final thoughts

The final film I uploaded onto YouTube

This is the final film we submitted. I am really happy with it and was surprised that we managed to do the full five minutes despite being in quarantine. We basically got everything we planned to do and got the whole story. I love the effects Flora came up with and I´m happy with my animations. I also loved the green screen we did. It was a lot of fun to experiment with and is something that I didn´t know how to before. I hadn´t even thought about using green paint like that before, to edit out pieces of oneself.

If we did have more time though, there is a couple of things we would´ve wanted to improve (, but as it was an experiment, I feel like it isn´t so important to refine). For one we would´ve liked to do more for the audio. Like I said in my audio for Power On post, we were planning to record everything ourselves. Maybe we could´ve left more time to edit the sound so we could´ve made a more immersive and interesting soundscape. I mostly just downloaded stuff from online, which works, but maybe it could´ve been more exciting to make my own or record my own. I didn´t have the time or the equipment though, and so what we managed to do with the sound, I think is perfectly good given the circumstances. Flora also said that if she had more time, she would´ve liked to explore even more effects, but I think she already did so much for it.

 I think what we could´ve done is reshoot the green screen bits. We didn´t quite get the green to be a flat colour and the paint was not very well done. It was also a different shade from the screen. The paint was meant to show the technological parts of Laura and I and I don´t know how well that succeeded. We should´ve been much more careful. For example, the bit on Laura´s arm that meant to be like a phone in her arm is not a nice shape. For it to be more convincing the edges should have been a lot straighter. Same goes to my eyes. I wanted to paint out my eyes/eyeballs, but I ended up smudging a lot. We did talk about if we were to do something like this again, we would try to use green paper instead. That would be much easier to cut into geometric shapes and wouldn´t have the shine that the paint did. The shine made it hard to key the green out properly. Also, I would´ve changed shirt as I find the Abba cat weird and disconnected and the blue in it was too close to green. But we did not have time to reshoot as I left for home the same day. We also talked about how it would´ve been nice to know the things Angie Taylor talked about in her session, when she showed us how to do keying. She went into much greater detail then we had before, and maybe we could´ve edited the green screen better if we had known all of that.

We would have filmed more stuff together if not for the corona situation. We planned to shoot stuff like swimming in a pool (instead of just washing hands, although I think it did end up working out), scenes in my room, walking outside and maybe showing some super powers that the character could´ve had. I don´t think this ended up effecting the final film that much actually. We still got everything we needed.

Another thing we thought about improving is colour correcting the 305 footage. It films such dull colours but we didn´t have time to go through all of it. We also think it seemed to record at a seemingly low quality, which is strange. 

All in all, I think we are both really happy the way it turned out and I think we have learned loads from the experience. I know that I leaned how to green screen and set up the studio for it, After Effects which is something I had never used before, rotoscoping and Animation Pro. I also really enjoyed the short videos we did leading up to this final project and I think they made me less afraid of making mistakes.