Final Twin Screen and Reflection

This project was supposed to finish before the filming week because I knew there won't be enough time for Twin Screen once I started filming the Experimental film. However, I tried to work on it in the filming week as well to improve it as much as possible due to my lack of skill to achieve what I wanted with the materials I have. I don't think my final work is telling the story that I wanted to tell about the futuristic 4th dimension. I don't really like it when my work can't speak for itself but this time my work has to view with a description to understand.

"A short story set in the future presented in both our dimension and 4th dimension.
A man living in the future where everything is packed and busy, tries to preserve his lover in 4th dimension where time is infinite. The 4th dimension collapse as the world itself is unstable to life forms. "

However, I am happy that I learnt more about After Effects. I am still not very confident using the programme but I found myself learning stuff easier while trying to follow Lynda tutorials than asking physical help, due to the fact that I can refer back to the video as many time as I want. Hopefully in summer I can learn more about this programme by self exploring and hope my laptop can handle it... This project took me an hour and a half to render it in W Building and I didn't dare to render it on my laptop. 

If I have more time I would like to develop more on the view of it and compose my own music. It would be fun to create a futuristic soundtrack involving the mysterious 4th dimension.   

After Effects Development

Footages


Rural : Farnham Park, field behind uni campus, green screen of me






Urban : London (Canary Wharf), green screen of Ethan





After Effects Applied

1. Portals between the two dimensions http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/animated_polygon/

I first watched the video above and customised myself a portal. Then I put it in the duel screen, duplicate and flip it on the other side and adjusted the angle. I hope to achieve the visual idea of a portal taking us to the other side of the world. Since I added a lot of details in it to make it a more special shape and animation, it took me the longest time to do and render it (a 5-second clip...).






2. Playing with opacity, glow

I chose the footages I want to overlay and adjusted the opacities. Then I played around different footages with the effect of Glow to give a more surreal view.


3. Green Screen

Before going to the journalism studio, I knew I need a boy on the left side of the screen and a girl on the other side, floating, if possible. They should be anonymous so they will be just be a shade and I masked out Ethan's hair as well.

I was trying to make the tree branches to look more like a busy internet/ web.

As for the floating part, I was thinking lay down on a table but then when I was in the studio I found two stools with green seats. The green seats are in a different shade of green then the green screen but I gave it a try. I tried to dangle my limbs and hair but they are too long to fit in the green screen. It would be better if the screen is also on the floor. When I do the editing, I had to mask out the chair because the shade is really different so can't be keyed out. In the last few seconds, Ethan walked into the frame so I masked him out and expand the mask according his movement in the last 2 seconds.







4. 3D Camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBXp9gdUtJU


As I want to create a story, I knew I want to add camera in it to give the scene a bit more movement. I only added it to slowly moving towards the floating/ buried character as I want to keep the scenery. 




5. Swirl

I used this effect to end the story and the world is a way to show the 4th dimension is unstable. I didn't use static/ noise to end the world as said in the last post because I think it makes more sense to have black screen/void to show a ended world.

6. Tint

I played around with colours at the end while the world is unstable.