January II : Snow

My friend Manaka Nagai has just gotten done filming her masters graduation film at the HFBK.

It's a nice studio film, based on very sad personal experiences of hers this past year.

Set in winter she wanted a shot of the city where her film takes place, so she had a small cardboard city made up, where her studio set room lives.

It being winter it's supposed to snow at the end, and she was vexed by the frequent problem of weather phenomenon being quite hard to film. Some of her snow was visible and some not.

So I offered my help with After Effects, so below is a moderately detailed example of how to work with analog footage in AE.

I've already finished the project, so I've retroactively turned effects and layers on/ off to illustrate my work process.

Original ungraded shot

We only really see snow in the background, and also not in the middle, these are the main issues that we need to deal with.

Sky masked and added extra layers (pre-composed)

I duplicate the footage, and make a mask for the sky. After this I can further duplicate the sky layers and move them around on the time line, so that there is more snow falling.

This current screenshot has the finished pre-composed layer, which we will open for the next screenshot

Inside the pre-comp

Here we see the various duplications of the original footage, the sky mask is added on top of the pre-comp in our main composition.

The contrast is much higher, obviously giving us more intense snow, and making the image black & white allows us to key out the background, so that we can see the snow behind the snow. Otherwise having multiple layers wouldn't achieve much, and lowering the opacity would weaken the strength of the snow that we just boosted.

Keying out the background is simply done with the Extract effect.

Making the rooftops snowy

Simple effects are the most effective in After Effects.

Once again duplicating the original layer, masking the roofs, we just boost the brightness with the Curves effect, then on the timeline we put a keyframe at the beginning, and then at 80% completion. First keyframe is ~20% opacity, the second is ~40% opacity.

So the rooftops get slowly more snowy.

Light pollution

Not what Manaka asked for, but some creative liberty, I found the black sky to be a bit empty, and you can never miss the hazy layer of light pollution over a city, so using two layers with separate masks (one mask the contour of the buildings, and the other you see above) we use the shape layer as an alpha matte, and the layer below it is a shape - just the colour orange.

But this needs to be super subtle, the opacity of the orange layer is 5%, and the alpha matte is super feathered.

Snow in front of the buildings and in the middle of the shot

Probably the more tricky part of the project, getting snow in front of the buildings.

There was some in the footage, but there's no was to separate it from the background and make it brighter like I did with the background.

So I just copied and pasted the snow from the background.

Once again we can only see the pre-comp in this screenshot.

Sampled snow

So doing my best to make it not look like looped sampled snow, I looped and sampled the snow, here you can see one of the masks which was taken from the buildings (as is plain to see from its shape).

Taking multiple such masks and scattering them throughout the empty spaces looks pretty ok.

If it were on a black background you would notice that something is off, but this way, in front of the buildings, it blends in very well.

Before

After 

January I : Trains

 I am in the process of writing and editing a short piece about trains.

Trains and fatherhood.

The unabating, relentless nature of these two, the locomotive and the child.

A few months back I bought some macro lens extension tubes for my Bolex, wanting to at least have the option of choosing that type of image for a future project. 

It was shortly after Cléo was born, September 2021, and one of the images I had in mind was her, her skin in a kind of abstract landscape format. Maybe the film would be called 'My Giant Baby' or something like that. But there wasn't really enough substance in the idea alone.

Then we moved, and our new place is next to the train tracks. Our old place was also next to the train tracks - but the difference is that freight trains come by our new place, and the intensity of the freight train piqued my interest. 

During the last year I'd found an old 300mm lens in the back rooms of the HFBK camera rental, and done a few small shots with it, but now combined with the macro lens possibility I thought it would be fitting to try and merge a super macro image with a super tele image.

Macro : Baby

Tele : Train 

Also a nice first project to do at home, during the first months of parenthood, in winter, during a pandemic.

I filmed at the beginning of December '21 and am almost done editing and writing now, at the end of January '22. This is always an exciting and tiresome time - having already come up with the (vague) idea and shot the footage I now need to come up with the glue so to speak, the text. 

I never write my texts beforehand. I will often have snippets written down in various places, written before and during shooting, but I don't try to presume that I will know what will actually come to be filmed even if I have a fairly concrete idea, as is the case in this project. There is always a puzzle at the end, and now it just needs to be put together - if only I could see all the pieces!

The final step of post-production is just as important as the steps prior, especially in the creative sense, by this time the film has had time to steep, and I've gotten to know my thoughts better. But it is never easy getting them out of my mind, on to paper, and spoken.

UPDATE 10.07.22 - A train of though for a train driver / Full Film