Live Brief 2 - Visual Effects for Guerrilla Filmmakers (Week 3)

Week 3 of the course commences 22nd February and is now more than half way through it's duration. Week 3's main focus is on Masking, Cloning and Crowds, these are very important techniques within the filmmaking world and the special effects world, and have been used on many huge blockbusters, to recreate war scenes in films, and to build armies that aren't really there. It's a clever technique and quite tricky to pull off. The course has an introduction to the basics of Masking, Cloning and Crowds, and how you would use these techniques in a film. It also features a short video on how you would prepare for a shoot that was including these special effects, which will be good to show with my crew if they intend to use any of these.

The course also comes with a Masking Checklist:

• If the colour or contrast of the image in your mask is different to the background layer, then sometimes a large feather will help it sit better in the shot, as the edges become gradual.
• A good way to keyframe a mask of particularly complex moves (say someone running in a zig zag across the scene) is to set keyframes at extremes (say every abrupt turn of the runner), and then set more again half way between those keyframes. And then half way between them…until the mask moves with the runner. It’s still easier than frame by frame!
• You can change the opacity of your mask, say to 95%, which can subtly bring the image underneath through to help with making your object ‘sit’ in the shot. Too much and you turn them into ghosts!
• Make sure you have enough points on your mask to accommodate future action in the shot. If you’ve put your actor into a rectangular mask and she starts ‘star-jumping’ later in the shot, you may have problems of overlap with other nearby characters. So, always look ahead through your footage.
• You can keyframe backwards. Start with your difficult star-jumping actress and then move backwards with your keyframes.
• Computers are dumb. If your mask isn’t blue in HitFilm, it’s not keyframeable!
  These are important to remember and keep in mind if ever filming on set for any of these techniques. 
  
  This weeks task in HitFilm is masking and cloning and provides all the footage for you to achieve these techniques. It uses both these techniques to create a scene of a man walking through a location multiple times at the same time. This technique is a great way to increase the scale and production value of your film because it makes it seem like you have greater the amount of people than you do. The week then continues on to have The Blaine Brothers and Haz talk about how and when they use masking and cloning in their productions, which is quite often in their own cases. For me green screen and masking and cloning doesn't seem to much easier and effective as a practical effect, which appears more real on the screen for a film.