THE VISUAL EFFECTS ON MY FILM (VFX)

I needed to use three Special Effects, or Visual Effects, in my film:-

Visual Effect #1

At the start of my film I wanted to create an effect as if the camera had risen up through the ground where a dead body had been buried and then up again through the ground until it breaks through the surface to reveal the woods.

Fig #1

Extract from my Storyboard.

I used a special Camera-Jib, which is like a see-saw with the camera on one end and weights on the other to balance it.  Using this Jib I recorded a slow section of the video (the Establishing Shot) when the camera was rising from ground level to about 5ft in the air.

I used a special software called 'AfterEffects' to overlay a picture of a skeleton in the ground over the video. I moved this picture slowly downwards which makes it look like a camera is moving upwards until it reveals the video underneath.

Fig #2

Picture used as an overlay

I am really pleased with how well this worked. It really does look like the camera has risen through the ground.  It turned out exactly as I wanted it to.



Visual Effect #2

The second visual effect in my film, is the effect of Davy hitting the person in the body bag really hard on the head with the spade. To do this, I first thought about making a dummy body (like a guy Fawkes dummy)

But in the end I decided to record a video of Davy moving the spade, starting from the body-bag, then swinging it away from the body-bag. I then reversed this video to make it look like he was swinging towards the Body-Bag. 

This was an idea I got from FilmRiot tutorial which can be seen in this video (skip to 2:30):

Fig #3

Film Riot Tutorial on Reversing video.

Visual Effect #3

The final visual effect in my film is where Davy shoots the Body-Bag and we see blood splatter and the gun hole in the Body-Bag. I wanted to do this to add the action aspect to my opening sequence.

Again I used the software 'AfterEffects' to do this. The software allows you to overlay an image or a video sequence over the top of my video.  I overlaid a video of a blood splatter and an image of a gun-shot hole.  I used the software to track the movement of tghe body-bag as it fell to the ground and made the image of the gun-shot hole follow this movement, frame-by-frame.