Production

In order to create our project, we needed to place two videos into final cut- one of the gherkin and one of the flames. The plane was an animation and so was not another video to layer and mask. Due to the lack of tools able to delete specifically chosen areas, we had to rely on tools which were only able to delete big sections, and would only erase/mask from one side. This meant that the video of the flames which we had layered over the Gherkin was difficult to crop as we could only do in in sections, and then having to rely on colour correction to make the smoke more visible. We did this by changing the mid, dark and lighter tones to create contrast in the smoke. We also had to rotate some of the frames so the smoke did not look too square. The feathering technique was useful to soften the edges, rounding them so they again appeared less sharp.

We encountered some problems in that the footage of the smoke was at first too slow when we imported it into final cut, so we speeded it up, but it was then too fast. This meant we had to slow it down again, making it appear out of sync with the Gherkin footage. The flames then lasted for three and a half seconds longer than the other footage, resulting in the need to copy the last few seconds of Gherkin film, reverse it- so it played back to front.

However, the flames appeared very jerky because the film had been slown down, and each individual frame had to be moved into position- meaning they did not align up properly. We then turned to stop animation blur to try to blend the smoke better, and image stabilizer to steady the handheld Gherkin footage in an attempt to try and stabilise the images.

We had the idea to import each individual frame into photoshop to get rid of any unwanted smoke that made the film look unrealistic, but at 24 frames per second with ours running at about 9 seconds, it would take too long to individually edit each frame and import them back into final draft.