Cinematography

Wally Pfister

Walter Pfister is an Academy Award-winning American cinematographer and director, best known for his work on Christopher Nolan's films, including Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises. Pfister is also known for his work on director F. Gary Gray's The Italian Job and Bennett Miller's Moneyball. 

His work is amazing, him and Nolan are perfect match in filmmaking in terms of director and Cinematographer. Looking at Nolan's films you see a cold lighting. He loves using blues in cinematography.
Chris talks about his meet up with him he saw The Hi-Line, which premiered at the nearby Sundance Film Festival. “I thought it was a beautifully executed film that was clearly produced with limited resources,” recalls Nolan. “I had to meet the guy who shot it.” He worked with him in his film Memento and since then, they been working together in every Christopher Nolan's project.

Tracking Part 2

Tracking

One of the videos I wanted to create a lighting effect onto the antena part top of the building like the movies where lightings and explosions happen ontop of tall buildings with a needle

My tracking didnt turn out good, it got messed up and went off track.

Orb Effect

I had reorded some videos that I wated to use for adding effects I learnt from online tutorials. One of the videos was this shot at sunset outside the University. I saw a tutorial online about creating a spinning tornado like effect and thought i might use it for this shot.

One of the problems i had faced was there was a border line  where the orb wasn't expanding wider. I tried to mask it and feather to soften the edges but it didn't work as i wanted. I followed the tutorial exactly and then i added  the eefct onto the video. I think I should have done it ontop of the video it would have turned out much better.

Falling ( green screen )

I downloaded a green screen footage online to practice my green screen keying out and background replacements. I found this great video which was used as a promo for some website. The whole concept was about a guy over-hearing another talking about his problems with a website server during a sky diving session.

First I did was key out the green properly using key-light effect and then add in the sky background to make it look believable and actually skydiving 

I added curves effect and Tint to come up with a believable colour tone that matches both the actors and the background. also I added wiggle for both the actor footage and the background both being different movements, to create camera shake and movement which sells the video of the guys falling.

Lastly I added an adjustment layer of which I added a lens flare and light to the bottom right to give the source of light. Overall I was satisfied with the outcome as I got to learn a lot about editing and staging it to sell the story.

One of my weekly tutorial I had with my group they suggested I looked at Video CoPilot for tutorials on green screen. I had already learnt how to keyout green but in this website I learnt about feathering out the spill of green and to remove all green from the shot throught alpha channel and increasing the whites and  the blacks to be solid, in this case the white is green and black is the rest of footage.

Filming Tips/Background Replacement

“If you can extend out to a wide shot to establish your world, it would definitely be way more convincing and will add a lot of production value”

Difference in using some wide angle shot to the video than using just close up shot, it will work and tell your story but the wide angle makes the story more relevant to the audience and familiarize with the environment, which will get the audience invested a lot more.

When talking about filming and setting up his effect shots and position, he talks about how having your focal point (where audience should be looking) whole in shot without effect to be added later makes it simpler

“Always turns out better than green screening since most of your actors body if not all is actually against the background your wanting to put them in, so the attention to your audience is on them (actor) and not the places that you’re adjusting. So any strings that your showing usually gets overlooked”

what this implies is that sometimes small effects add more to the story and action in the background even though you want the audience to focus on something else. The audience’s mind picks up these small details whilst focusing on something else. Even though the changes might be small, its still makes the scene more convincing.