Visual Effects... Adapting to the power of the digital side!

While editing Wildlife on Mars, I have found myself using more and more ways to enhance the film digitally, not necessarily adding CGI to it, but enhancing shots with the digital technology.

Due to my limited knowledge of learning Adobe products I sourced Youtube for many tutorials on how to achieve certain looks I had in mind, namely tutorials from Premiere Gal and VideoRevealed.

 

For example, I originally planned to shoot point of veiw (POV) shots to put the audience in the shoes of the Alloceratops, after I shot the footage, I began to think how else could I enforce that what the audience was seeing was the POV of the Alloceratops, then I thought about the colour, perhaps they wouldn't see colour like we do, maybe its a different spectrum, inspired by George Pal's War of the Worlds alien probe eye, it inspired me to change the colours. 

Then I thought about how the lens would function, perhaps its near sighted and relies on its sense of smell to find food which would then make sense in the animation performance seeing the Alloceratops sniff the air, perhaps I could add in blinking effect since we do see the inside of our own eyelids, for a fraction of a second of course.

To shoot the POV footage I decided to use a photography trick by filming the scene backwards and playing it forwards. Using a slice of paper to act as a sledge over the course set floor, I gently pulled back the camera one frame at a time and reversed the footage to make it appear as if it was going forwards. However due to the set floor being uneven the footage was shaky, luckily there is a plugin on Adobe Premiere called Warp Stabilizer which takes shaky footage and renders it into a steady image.