Thought's

Now that I have established what the story is about I'll go into some extra detail.

This short is intended to show off my skills in a mixture of areas from Compositing and VFX to film production. My intentions are to work with people in their areas of expertise. So for this project I will be outsourcing music to a professional to gain the best quality possible and if I can find someone I will out source sound design too. I would love to learn this skill but at the moment I need to concentrate on the areas I have experience in and how to improve them.

This short, is a sword fight with computer generated swords integrated into live action footage. The script says it is set, exterior night but I have a few bumb's along the road that I need to look into.

 Day for Night?

First is the choice between full night shooting where I will get real shadows in the lighting or day for night shooting where it would be easier to light in general. I'm starting to think I want to film at night and provide lighting but I am not sure at the moment. This is where testing comes in. I will need to take images of day shooting and convert them to night or take the camera out at night and take the images again from the same spot to compare.

Day for night image taken from: http://ifsstech.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/day-for-night/

Mo-cap or sword slap?

Next challenge is weather to use tracking points in the image and track the sword movement straight form the camera or shall I use the motion capture studio the university has on offer. I have tracking experience but to track a sword I will have to shoot on at least 1/250 shutter speed to collect the data I need to track. This can cause a mass of problems such as 1/250 is very dark for a night shoot so to track, the previous decision of Day for Night would be very appealing. That or I light the scene a lot but that would start creating a false look to the scene. 1/250 would make it look very odd in the first place. Adding motion blur would be another issue here.

Or I could go for another option where I use the motion capture studio to apply the movement to the swords in 3D space where I could still shoot at night and without a worry of hight shutter speeds or adding unreal light. Only fear here is I have no experience in motion capture and I would be learning the skill from the ground up. I love a challenge but I wouldn't want it to hinder my production time.

Mo-cap image taken from Tigermyuou user in DeviantArt

So this is a couple of stumps in the road which I need to decide on a solution though testing. Next things are CG designs for the swords and a full VFX list of what I need to do to achieve this short.