Constant Cinema

 Part of modern film making at any level these days is visual effects. It might be something as spectacular as compositing explosions or as simple as logo replacement on a sign. Adobe After Effects has always been a part of my film making approach. I've often used it for color correction and titles, but I've also done a little bit of small compositing (for bigger jobs I rely on more talented individuals like my friend Jason Rutelege at Ghostcraft Visual Effects). Film is a great medium and to me, there's no reason why you should't employ digital effects even in as small a format as Super 8.

10 minutes in to shooting the first 52WP short I knew that I was going to have to call upon After Effects for a little of its magic.. I set the phone phone to show a time appropriate to the story (a few minutes before midnight on NYE); however time went on as I was setting up and I forgot to set it back. I noticed my mistake as I was shooting, but of course with one take there was no turning back and no re-shooting.

Fortunately this was a pretty easy fix. I just duplicated the footage, masked out the 2 on the top layer, moved the bottom layer so that the 1 filled in the hole, and animated the position of the bottom layer. Since it was a short clip I keyframed every frame. I was editing in Final Cut Pro, so I just exported a TIFF sequence from After Effects and dropped it in the appropriate spot in the timeline. It came out a little sketchy if you look at it frame by frame, but altogether it looks fine. Fortunately, the phone is a pretty bright light source and the screen turns out to not be very grainy, which helped.