Feedback & Grading Criteria

Fail Pass Merit Distinction

Planning and Ineffective 4.1 Demonstrate 4.1 Demonstrate 4.1 Demonstrate

Production planning and little the ability to plan, the ability to plan, the ability to plan,
or no evaluation organise and organise and organise and
 Pre-production against aims. produce a creative produce a creative produce a creative
booklet Task or tasks are media production media production media production
 Actors incomplete. project within an project within an project within an
confirmation agreed time frame agreed time frame agreed time frame
 Location to a satisfactory to a high standard to a very high
confirmation standard standard.

Feedback Date: 23/4/21

This week I did the Visual effects for the scenes on the moon and continued to film the internal
shots of the LEM.

This week I started editing at college by adding Visual effects to my production, in particular the
scenes shot on my moon set which have been mostly finished. While filming a lot of the models
were suspended by a threaded rod, wrapped in green card. I had planned to just key out this
green however I realised that in a couple of scenes that green card was not well lit enough or just
badly placed and resulted in me struggling to get a good key. Instead, I resorted to either masking
it by hand or using after effects’ roto-scope tool. This allowed me to separate the astronauts and
space ship from the background and make it look like they are floating. I then added motion blur
to smooth over some of the clips to make it look like juddery which is hard to get rid of in stop
motion. Sometimes the set would be too small and the edges could be seen in the side of shots to
solve this I would duplicate parts of the background and overlay them on top of these areas, this
was a technique I worked out after watching how they some YouTube tutorials on set extensions.
These effects took longer than I planned to do as it involved waiting a long time for individual
scenes to render before, I could work out what to adjust, I think that with more powerful
computers I could have done these effects far quicker and easier than I did this week. If I was to
do this scene again, I would use a more powerful computer and shot the original shots with better
lighting so the green card can be easily keyed. There are a couple of scenes where the effects look
so bad, I do not think they could be placed in the final film such as the scene where the LEM lands
due to the way the shot is laid out the LEM cannot be separated properly from the background.

This week I started properly filming inside the LEM set, unlike the moon set I have set the camera
settings up differently to accommodate this new environment. The F-stop has been lowed to
around 18 as a 22 F-stop caused dust on the lens to appear on the photographs, in the smaller
LEM set there were more lights to cause this effect and the background was far enough away to
require it. For the opening scene I wanted to have the camera track out of the LEM revealing the
craft and a lens flare however to get all this in one shot was really difficult. Firstly, the set had to
be positioned downwards so I could use my vertical tracking rig to get the camera into the set,
then I had to figure out away to get light into the LEM through the windows, my solution was to
place a mirror on the floor and point the source 4 spot light on it so it would reflect light into the
craft. This whole rig worked incredibly well and created a smooth motion without the need for
external digital techniques. The astronaut models were incredibly stiff to move and they had a
built-in lack of movement, this caused 2 problems when filming. Firstly, this meant that I couldn’t
just stick the astronauts to the set with blue tack as the pressure required to move the limbs
would unstick it as a result, I had to drill holes in the astronaut’s feet and pin their feet into a
wooden block. The next problem was that it was hard to give the characters much to do with such
limited movement as there was not much they could do to show what should be happening in a
Feedback & Grading Criteria

scene, this means that a lot of the story will be told via the audio rather than the visuals.

Although slow on the editing front the filming has been very successful and very quick, I hope that
by next week I should have the whole film shot and ready to edit for the following week. Next
week I will start doing VFX on the external shots of the LEM so the week after I can start working
on the final edit.