LBL 004 GHOST Rodriguez

Video Info

Description:

Just in time for Halloween, the third project at Lost Boys Learning is the popular Ghost project. In order to create a ghostly apparition that is subtle and believable, students worked entirely within our compositing software NUKE, as well as shooting individual live action background plates, black screen character plates in our studio and a group cloud tank elements shoot. Blending together the three live action plates, the students strive to create volume and cohesion between the different 2D elements and a scary ghost. Creating abstract, amorphous VFX can be a very challenging experience. Unlike recreating practical or physical objects the students design a look that requires subtlety and creative vision. In a real production experience, the client or supervisor will have difficulty explaining exactly what they are looking for, so it is up to the artist to analyze all their references and design a look that can be effectively sold to the client. The artist might hear thats not quite what Im looking for...but Ill know when I see it or more oily smoky, brighter but more subtle, etc.. The Ghost project is designed to demonstrate the power of leveraging practical elements (physical effects filmed in studio) to achieve very organic looking effects in a short period of time. In our studio, we shot a variety of substances on our high definition video camera including fluorescent ink, egg whites, cream and sparkles in our cloud tank a repurposed fish tank set up with a black light. Our students have four weeks from start to finish, including finding relevant film reference, designing their idea and scouting locations. This year, we shot in the village of Cumberland, including the museum mine shaft display, the Japanese cemetary and an abandoned mine; and at the old dairy ruins in Merville. Lost Boys Learning is located in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island a community with a huge variety of accessible, free locations, including urban, rural, seaside, old growth forest, ruins and mountains. For this shoot, we used guerrilla style filming with our portable generator, fog machine, lighting kit and occasionally a bit of fire starter in hand. My Ghost Project was inspired by the effects in the movie Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix. My character is the ghost of a bride; her unexplained murder has left her angry and she remains in this world. In order to integrate this idea with a real background I choose a Japanese shrine close to Cumberland. The hardest part in this project for me was to integrate the fog which was a practical element filmed in a cloud tank. The element was high resolution and required both time warping and mesh warping which challenged my compositing considerably. Monica Rodriguez

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