Having come to the end of the editing process for Project Brief 4, I can say that the outcome is nothing like I imagined.

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My intention with Sleep was to explore Matte Paintings, which kind of morphed into Mattes in general and in the end, became much more about the process of creating picture in picture mattes with my main character. Thomas was kind enough to offer his services as an actor, especially kind considering the script I gave him and it’s complete non-sensical nature. Unfortunately the venue we had to shoot in was not going to allow more than two hours for the day that Thomas was free to shoot and the script in it’s original form would have taken the whole day. It was at this point that I had to condense the idea and figure out how to achieve the lighting effects in far less than half the time. The solution was to use two LED panel lights to light the entire film. I balanced one light at 5600K and the other at 3200K to give the scenes a warm look and swapped the lights along the 180 degree line to indicate that Thomas was asleep.

This enabled me to shoot between the classroom location and Dominick’s daydream location quickly and because of this replicate shots and camera moves so that they could be matted later between the two. A great example is this shot:

The shot on top is a shot of Thomas at the desk lit in only 5600K from behind which has been Black matted over the bottom shot. The bottom shot is the inverse of him at the piano lit with 5600K directly above and in front of him, with 3200K filling it in. The shots were shot sequentially with the same lens at the same distance so that the image would overlap in the right place.

The process of editing was the most excruciating because even then, I felt really rushed. The shot that I had planned to use as my primary matte painted shot in the film didn’t really work out as I had hoped due to the short time I had on set.

I wanted to bring a level of authenticity and old school to the film but the work I had painted on the iPad ended up being not only far too cartoonish (I’m not really an artist) but also would only have worked with the original shot I had been planning for the film and due to the rushed nature of the shoot, I had to improvise. Still, I managed to work in the moon rock and stars into the final video.

The mattes themselves took a while to get right. At first, I wanted to use a Screen blending mode (which would have been much simpler than the effect here) however, the screen blending mode was too weak and even slightly off-white tones were still rendered transparently. Linear keying Black also produced a similar effect except it desaturated the image too much and was laced with artefacts. The final effect here is a blend between a Luma Matte with a very high threshold and lots of Level compression.

I think, overall the video is a success. It incorporates and explores the elements I wanted to explore, the way I got there in the end was a little shaky and I desperately wish I had more time during production so that some of the ideas I had for Post Production could have been more fully realised.