Transform Your Location for $0 Dollars

locations can be a complete pain probably my most hated thing to deal with when it comes to making anything it's incredibly hard to find something that fits and if you're low to no budget what you can and cannot do tends to be a very small Lane but you can fake it or transform what you do have with some tricks in post- production these tricks can go from the very simple to the more complicated so let's just start with the simple okay so an open field is going to be one of the easiest locations that you can get but often we are restricted by time or other factors or maybe you're unhappy with how full or thin the trees are or again are short on time and have a busy road right next to your best nearby option like this here and this is some of the easiest to transform in post to do that we are taking a frame into Photoshop then we can start with removing smaller areas so that these elements aren't driving any detail when we use generative fill then we expanded the grass filled in the gaps in the tree behind Emily then completed the tree line before again hiding the plate and exploring to a PNG and after effects with the generate fill layer in the comp we'll use a mask and duplicate to separate the ground from the trees then on the trees layer use turbulent displace displ displ with a low amount size boosted complexity and animated Evolution to try and roughly match the wind movement that we see on the original treat and once again we'll rotor brush Emily on a new layer to place her above the generative fill layers in the plate we can see some insects flying around but are hidden by the generative fill layers so we can add these back in using assets from actionvfx [Music] docomo like this next to a city street can be very complicated for plenty of reasons so instead of leaving the office we grab this strip of brick style paneling slapped it against the wall outside and had our shot again we're using generative fi to extend the brick on the right and to had some interest we went with a doorway here then on the left we extended again but wanted the wall to end revealing a street to do that we grabbed some stock footage but we want to create a road area now which we can blend into the rest of the background later on up top we added a metal compartment to break up the continuous brick pattern and you could try adding things like graffiti to the wall but it felt a bit too in yourr face for us on this one so we just chose to do more subtle details adding minor destruction to vary the bricks which also added depth to what was a thin piece of bake wall we also used some masks to pick and choose what we wanted in and eventually we had this inside of After Effects we masked just Emily's section of the footage to keep it visible masked the extended wall to remove the street and another MK to keep the bottom section of the road with a high feather to blend then we found this free stock footage from pexels.com of a street with passing cars which we scaled up and framed to match our shot before using Hue and saturation curves to color correct to our scene and a camera lens blur to KN it slightly out of focus and finally we added a couple of grunge textures set to multiply to add further detail to the wall giving us this the quality of the freestock footage isn't the best so it is notching the effect down a touch but you could always swap that out for something you're actually paying for that has much higher quality we can also take the grade further or add a camera shake to help as well and to keep driving the idea home I do get how 101 that is and often might not be right for your final shot but this of idea can and has been very useful for me in post- production trying things out and showing my collaborators to get us all locked to the same page and then doing a much better shot later on but then of course we can take it much further than these simple ideas into something that would be our final shot like this goodbye for this one we actually did have to find a location to shoot our plate to sa from having to make it complicated or need a budget we just ran in and grabbed our shot and left but that does bring me to today's sponsor which is producer we've shown producer on the show before and dug pretty deep into what it is you can find a link to that in the notes below but it's an amazing tool for creators that helps organize the entire process all in one place inside of your project you have five main tabs that take you from development all the way through delivery and once you drill down to each phase you can very much tell that this was made by actual working filmmakers that understand the process and what's needed so if you're a producer line producer director cinematographer editor or in the location or casting departments this is absolutely for you like we showed in our other episode this app helps build out the process with casting shot listing storyboards to shoot days where you can utilize the shot list you created to schedule out your shoot and stay organized on your actual production days and then even in post with the ability to upload Lo the project for notes and further collaboration but again we showed all of that in another episode however since then producer has continued to improve we now have larger file transfers with no size limit and no need for other apps link sharing with the ability to view comment and download from any device they're also getting out of beta with a much more reliable application and thousands of users something that I love here is what it gives us when scouting locations we can have our team member go out scouting shoot videos and pictures with their phone then immediately upload it to the app for me to review give my thoughts and so on that sort of thing really does streamline the process and help us move more quickly and efficiently throughout each production if you want to try producer for yourself and you absolutely should you can get 15% off on all plans until May 24th by using the coupon code film right yearly for a yearly plan and film right monthly for a monthly plan all those details and a link to our in-depth review in the notes below goodbye but once we had our location we grabbed our Ronin 4D to get the shot silky smooth and once we had our shot we shot it over to Mattis to do his [Applause] Wizardry we could do two full episodes on a shot like this but what I'm really wanting to do here is cover Concepts that you can take and run with so we are going to break this down to four simple phases first we track the shot using the built-in camera tracker inside of After Effects then using the blender add-on called AE to blend we were able to transfer our solve to blender then you'll make sure to set the correct scene frame rate lens and sensor width once you're inside a blender now you can turn on the camera overlay so that we can see our footage and line everything up to the correct axis and once everything is all lined up we will move to the first frame of our shot and start modeling a low poly version of our environment in 3D since we're modeling from the camera's perspective and if we have a good solve and match everything perfectly during the tracking everything should line up just fine but after the low poly model of our environment is done we will project the footage back to it we're doing this so that we can use that geometry with an emission Shader to project lights back to our CG objects later on we're also using this geometry to act as a shadow catcher to capture all CG Shadows that we will be comping together later as well we wanted to add a very stylistic future field to our world so we gathered some references from children and Men Fallout and a bunch of other things to build out our reference board then we can start to block out our shot which the blockout acts as a very first layer where everything should be going in our shot it's just cubes and other primitive shapes placed around our 3D scene to give us a sense of the final form and a blueprint to build on top [Music] of once we have our blocking done we can start filling the scene with assets which is all about the vision of the specific project most of the models were made from scratch to fit our scenes perfectly because Mattis then we added neon signs hologram signs big LCD screens and then just kept throwing stuff at it until we were happy with the result again just placing things seeing how it felt then refining a rendered layer setup was very basic as well remember that shadow catcher mentioned earlier we use that one on a separate layer to catch all of the Shadows from our CG objects we've made projected footage with emission material to act as a holdout to give us a mask for our CG objects and at the same time making it invisible to the CG camera since we only want to capture its Reflections and not the geometry itself so in the end we have a total of three different layers we have our live footage which acts as a base layer for everything we put CG Shadows on top of it and masked out unnecessary bits and on top of everything we put our main CG layer we did a few color adjustments camera lens blur Mass different parts of the layer and gave it a bit of a tint effect to mimic atmosphere then comped all of that together inside of after effects to have our final shot and this same idea can be used more subtly maybe you do want to go for more of that grounded children of men look or maybe you want to explore a more stylized idea than we even did or extend a building upward like we did here and again I know that this was all a very basic overview but the idea is there's no limit to what you can try with just a little practical to build off of you can extend your ideas out into the Fantastic to create massive worlds and Concepts so look around at what you have accessible to you and think about how you can build on top of that to tell your stories without restriction as always if you like the episode subscribe and hit the Bell so you're notified when we release more content until next time don't forget to write shoot edit repeat [Music] see you later t

Channel: Film Riot

Views: 167,126

Keywords: film riot, triune films, ryan connolly, filmmaking, tutorial, how to, adobe, film school

Id: z92bGAWLc84

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2024