Fading Into The Darkness release
I'd like to announce that we've finally completed our new short "Fading Into The Darkness". The idea start back in early December 2008 when we were pondering about a new idea for a movie. Melina Soochan was coming to Toronto from Montréal when we decided to shoot something short because of everyone's schedule.
By the time she came, we had an outline. The objective was to film every scene that she was going to be in and film the rest by ourselves once she left. The filming was done in late December to early January, some small inserts were filmed near the end of January. The editing took about 2 months to do it juggling between real work and personal entertainment.
During production, we were still writing the story. With a few months of thinking we've finally completed it and slowly the movie came together in the editing phase. One of the technical difference from our previous works and this one is that this project used the most special effects. There were about 70% of the shots that had to be manipulated to portray the story better.
One of the most difficult shots was when the actors were running in the street at night time. We had to fill in the background with the city burning and garbage all around the street. The camera was on a track. In post production, tracking the camera's movement proved to be the most difficult aspect of this shot for us. The shot should be tracked in 3D, but we decided to do the tracking in After Effects. Some of the parts were manually tracked. Once the tracking information was completed, we placed the objects (city, fire, rubble) into the shot and colour corrected them. Masking would be created so that the objects wouldn't cover the actors. The masking was animated almost frame by frame. Each section of the body had a different mask.
Another shot was the last shot of the movie. First of all we had to stabilize the footage because it was shaking and Melina wasn't in the middle of the frame. Once it was stabilize we had to track the shot. We had three different tracking data to cover the camera's movement. Once that was completed, we manually adjusted some of the track points. The tracking is very important, because all the data will be linked into that information, and if its not accurate, then the scenery you place in the background will start moving. We then added the artificial sky, and "snow blow" at the top of the mountain to give the scene a more realistic feel. We also added birds and snow at the end. This shot also required us to remove objects that shouldn't be in there like the shovel that we've placed in to help us track the shot. We then had to create masks so that the scenery will not overlap the actress. The masking was animated almost frame by frame for this shot as well.
I hope you'll enjoy this short presentation, I know that we've had a fun time making it!
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Labels: behind the scenes toronto independent short movies films
posted by Azure Production @ 6:37 PM
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