#tracking 1

Well. We’re here! Year 2, I’m honestly so excited that we’re finally back to work. I’ve really missed being productive over summer but I’m back with tons of ideas and ready to learn new skills. Tracking is our first project back and I’ve been excited about this since the beginning of the first year. 

All our lectures at the university have been super interesting, where we’ve learnt multiple skills such as tracking in after effects, nuke and pftrack. I felt most confident using after effects for this project so ended up using it for the final part but have been working to improve my skills in each. I think for tracking 2 I will definitely try and branch out to the other two. 

There’s a couple of things which I feel went wrong for me with this project, such as the disaster shoot and it took me a while to come up with my idea. But I feel that both of these were handled pretty well. For example; I was able to organise a re-shoot the next day after noticing that my footage was pretty unusable. I know that one of my strengths is organising, which is why I was able to quickly re-organise a reshoot pretty fast.

I also learnt that for next projects, I will need to ask someone to get a re-fresher on the camera or ask Rasmus or someone whose good with a camera to film for me. Obviously, I would give them the storyboard and direct the shot as I did this time, but this is a weakness area of mine which I will defiantly work on. 

One thing I really enjoyed with this project was coming up with the story section of my advert, I think it was something fun to do. I was able to put tracking into my scene with a fun twist of having dark technology. I am super happy with how it worked out and how everything looks and how the simple story plays out. 

I am very happy with how the HUD graphics has turned out, I think that they’re really effective within my piece. I enjoyed researching into them and coming up with an aesthetic with the piece where I also looked at the colour grading and tried to match it up to the feel of a Black Mirror episode.

A funny coincidence which happened when shooting for the second time, is that both Harry and Becca (my actors) wore pink, which was similar to the pink colour scheme which is in the Black Mirror episode, Nosedive, which I based some of my work on. This helped when creating a colour scheme and it turned out to be a fun coincidence. 

Overall, I’m very happy with everything todo with this project. I’m happy with how everything looks and am excited to keep developing my tracking skills for the next project and many in the future. 

Here is the final version of my project:

Each shot I decided to have specific things tracked here’s a shot breakdown: 

Shot One: 

In this shot two main things have been tracked; the glasses and the computer screen. In this shot, I added the graphics to the computer, where I replaced just my desktop background and tracked it to the camera movements. I tracked the glasses to the camera movements and then added circles to indicate a reminder has been going off on the HUD.

Shot two:

Here I created graphics and tracked them too the glasses. I also added a track to her eyeballs circling the pupils, which is a refernece to the black mirror contact lenses which they use in the future. 

Shot Three:

In this shot, there’s not much tracking, just the introduction of simple HUD and the Alert which aren’t tracked. I tracked the circles in the background which go ver, the kettle, the knives and monster can.

Shot Four:

In this shot, a lot of things have been tracked. As Harry walks towards the camera, I track the facial circles to his body. Once he’s stood in front of the camera, I track his eyes and the corner of his mouth for various parts. I also tracked his pupil on the left-hand side as an analysis point. 

Here’s my first rough cut without the end HUD; I also am not the biggest fan of the kitchen scene in this so I think I will change it up but this is my initial cut:  

After a few colour grading lectures, I really understand how colour grading is extremely important, especially when trying to convey a point/message. For my work as the idea is an advert about a technology which would exist within the ‘Black Mirror’ universe; Here are a few screen grabs from the episode:

The begining

The middle

The Ending

I used this episode as inspiration as this technology and the HUD interested me, so I decided to base my colour scheme from around the middle of the episode. Adding more blues and extracting other colours to give it this cold and brutal feeling.

Before

After

For the audio once I’d picked it I needed to make sure that it would fit the audios I created; so I decided to pause editing my other shots and add the audio to my first two shots to make sure it works. As you can see from this example it works pretty well, I’m very happy with how it looks and how the synchronisation went and will be doing this once all shots are finished.

So with the fifth, I have had a bit of an issue, coming up with a POV graphics. I wanted to make them minimalist looking but also noticeable for the viewers to be able to read. So I decided on google to look up some more subtle HUD’s which I could use for an inspiration; There are my favourite 2: 

I also looked back at my initial inspiration, as I had spoken to my friends one of my main inspirations is Black Mirror; the episode ‘Nosedive’ and the technology which comes from the contact lenses and social media which the character uses. Here’s a screen shot showing this: 

Here’s a screen grab to show the similarities of all three of my inspirations: 

Here’s the test I made editing the HUD: