Mercy: City Landscape Research for Matte Painting

Before I get on with the Matte Paint, I have done some research into some city skylines in order to look at sizing and perspective. The overall look that the Director, John, has asked for, is for it to look gritty. John will be creating any of the buildings needed using 3DS Max professional modelling software.

Whilst looking at examples on the internet, I have taken note to the colour scheme and similarities within the photos. It has a lot of broken down gritty looks. The thoughts that came to mind were prominently some of the buildings that you see in the video game, Grand Theft Auto 5.

Although when I create this city, I will be mainly just adding some buildings into a background of a real building that is physically there. This is so that the location looks bigger and that we are actually in a large town/city. With them being in the background, I hope for them to look more realistic and less video game models. However, John will be creating those.

Gods Among Us: Green Screening Research and Experiments (FMP)

Throughout my Minor Project, I began by researching further into the background of green-screening. Then also experimented with some green-screening. Since 'Gods Among Us' has some heavy CGI, I will be able to use the knowledge of green screening and key framing/animating movement as well as editing the main story.

Minimal Lighting Test with Green Screen

Minimal Lighting Test

This test included very little lighting. The idea was to see how bad the quality of the content is when you do not have good lighting. The image is even darker than the original because there is black video behind the image and it is seeking through all the particles in the video, due to bad quality of the lighting. When playing it back, the video has became extremely grainy.

The screen color needs to be as opposite to the persons skin colour and also balanced with light. Otherwise, it isn't going to work. Therefore, the screen needs to be lit so it is a bright green. However, you still need to be careful of over exposing it.

Too Much Lighting/Over Exposure

When taking out the green from the image, you can still see when too much light is hitting the back of the screen. This then becomes difficult to change the screen gain. To make the background you are about to place in look solid, the whole of the background behind the subject should be completely black in the image above. This is becomes a struggles because of the bad lighting.

When I take out more screen gain to reduce the background, the more the subject loses quality.

This is when I would add more screen balance so the subject is not merging into the background. In this image, I am losing too much of the subject and that will create the subject to become slightly transparent causing them to merge into the background.

Applying this to 'Gods Among Us' (Now Mercy)

Green screen was going to be needed for Gods Among Us to create an Egyptian setting.

Gods Among Us: Blue Screen Experiment Issues

I have been given some footage from the rest of my crew to test some blue screens. It was recorded on the black magic in the university film studio. In my experimentation, these are my main issues:

• Too much shadow casted on the actor as they move. Depends on what the background is like and where the light source is coming from but I wasn't given backgrounds to work with. I just found something from google images for test purposes only. 

Image 1

Image 2

• The actors arms have a lot of shadows but I am unsure if this is meant to be deliberate to work with the background. However, no backgrounds have been given, just foregrounds. With this being recorded from the Black Magic, I have enhanced a lot of colour. The photo shown above is just a before image. The blue was enhanced reasonably well without effecting the actor.

• As opposed to the above, another clip I tried to work with had better lighting on the actor than it did on the blue screen. This meant that it was really difficult to key out the background from the foreground. The blue wasn't bright enough and when enhanced, it also had an affect on the actor.

Image 3

• In image 3 shows the clip mentioned in the above point. The background is far too dark. Image 4 shows when I attempted to enhance the colour.

Image 4

• The colour on the actors face and body is changed a lot. I intend to experiment some more with the colour balance but it might help/take less time up if the lighting in the background was lit a little bit more.