The Rest of The Film Continues...

I have been working on the living room scene to the film, and testing out ideas.

Here is how improving the shots and grading it is going so far:

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

The Final Outcome: "Conjure: Visual Effects Excerpt"

Yeah, it is, it is about time I posted this up. So, this is what this entire blog has built towards (let's hope that it's not an anti-climax):

CONJURE: Visual Effects Excerpt from Fraser Murdoch on Vimeo.

Thanks for reading and watching.

Now, it's all about completing that final, full version of the picture.

Images For Show

Poster Concept #01

Final Stills

Some Nuke Scripts/Node Trees

Here are a selection of screen grabs of Node Trees from Nuke:

These examples show the compositing processes undertaken on these particular shots.

Grading Before The Grading

So, the process is nearing the end and assessments are only a yard ahead of us.

I have rendered the final shots out from Nuke, tweaking little parts still, and graded the full piece of 29 shots, flicking in between to make sure they synchronise.

Here is a breakdown of one shot:

This shows the grading process. First of of all cooling the image down by shifting the hue (HueShift, of all names) and screening this in. This washes the image as well a bit, so contrast is risen and gain is decreased. Then more measures using ColorCorrect and ColorLookup are taken in order to cool the image off to a blue - subtracting the red, and adding the blue.

A glow is also applied in some shots. This helps for the dreaminess of the scene, but also to soften some of the clipping in some of the alleyway shots. It also generally makes the image look a lot more attractive.

This can either be achieved with a Glow node, or by doing it manually. I have opted for the latter for more control to add more effects to the glow. One would isolate the areas to glow (highlights) by grading the black and white points. Because of the warm image, it needs desaturated using the ColorCorrect saturation slider. Then a simple blur across it (subtly), and merging this with a 'screen' function. A may also use the highlights from the grade to add a Glint effect which stretches the highlights - most often for keyed shots as this integrates the character much like a LightWrap but with a different shape (it is good to mix it with a light wrap at very low mixture levels in my opinion.)

Occasionally I would rotoscope areas which I desire to stay warm and merge this on top (mixed to a low level). This theoretically creates more depth or less, or least a little bit of variation in terms of colour.