Extended Practise: Final Film Post-Production

 Extended Practise
Final Film Post-Production

• This week:
• I worked on the Post-Production and VFX for my Final Film.
• What went well:
• Emily put together a Gantt Sheet for Post-Production for both Joseph and I, as we were sharing the work for Post. I found this incredibly helpful, as I usually wouldn't schedule my time for Post-Production, but as I had multiple projects I was doing Post for, this was particularly helpful.
• Here is the Post-Production Gantt Sheet, made by Emily:

• We decided to split Post-Production by Scenes and location, therefore Joseph took the Post and VFX for Shots 1-14 and I took the VFX for Shots 15-23. When it came to editing the transition between 14 and 15, Joseph edited 14, within his composite and exported it, so then I could add the lighting to Shot 15. This method worked very well!
• Using what I had learnt doing Post-Production on other projects, I found the process less daunting, as I had a general idea of lighting VFX I could add. For example, using Masks so I could add the light of the laptop and a Light Sweep for light coming from above him:

• I used a blue solid overlay to increase the contrast of the colours and make the scene feel like it's set at night. I think this effect worked really well.
• I applied a contrast and shadow adjustment to the part where the Air Hostess leans in to the camera. Also applying a Light Sweep really helped with the contrast and ambient lighting. Here is what this looked like:

• This contrast of colour worked really well, especially when I made a change of colour when the plane starts to experience turbulence. With a flash of light, the colours change to a flashing red, which really adds to the drama of the situation. 

• Overall the lighting and colour changes really helped with the story-telling and in conjunction with the music and foley, it works very well. 
• In addition to adding lighting and colour effects, I decided it would be better to add a Post-Credits to the animation, rather than try rushing the credits over the final couple of shots. I also believed it worked better for the type of animation it was, as a childrens' animation. I researched a little bit for this and I found this website which talks about "Creative Closing Credits", with a section for Animation, which can be found here: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreativeClosingCredits. The idea of Disney Pixar's Ups' closing credits using the scrapbook really stood out to me. I decided to add something which could reflect the airport themes, so I created a series of  Passports for the characters.
• Here are the character Passports:

• I created five passports to make sure I had enough to come on-screen when I was making the credits. Here is the final end-credits I composited and animated in After Effects:

• As I had composited all of the lighting and VFX for Shots 15-23 within one After Effects project, it made it easy to copy effects from one composite to another. I additionally could make use of Pre-composites to keep lighting consistent between scenes. This made the process much easier, so then I could export the final composite as an MP4 of Shots 15-23.
• Here is the final composite of my post-production:

• What could be improved:
• I have noticed some errors in the animation, which will need updating. I will adjust these before I put the final composite together. These are:
• The animation of the Air Hostess jumping backwards is the wrong version. I will need to re-shade this shot and re-import it.
• The laptop is floating in the shot of Geoffrey looking down at the laptop, I will need to go into that shot and draw in Geoffrey's body and feet, so it's resting on him, rather than floating in the air.
• The background for the Airplane in the very last shot seems to have an error with the railing of the stairs. This needs to be also adjusted in the Toon Boom File and re-exported.
• Next time:
• I will be adding the final adjustments, then compositing the final scenes together with music and foley.