2024 Green Screen Shooting, Keying, Compositing, Camera tracking
3D Modeling and Rendering, Video editing, and Sound design
Through Your Eyes revolves around the concepts of change and endurance. The project aims at encapsulating the experience of meeting someone who changes your life entirely, shifting your perspective on things. The deep transformation they triggered in you perpetuates, even after their departure. From dark to light, scary to welcoming, the journey encapsulated in this piece shows how change is often just a matter of perspective.
Conceptualisation
When studying Visual Effects for the first time, I was fascinated by its ability to create a bridge between fantasy and reality. This contrast is what inspired me to create Through Your Eyes, a piece where the narrative revolves around a contrast of two opposing feelings: warmth and fear.
As I was ideating the story for this short narrative, I thought about the journey of learning how to look at things in a different way. As the viewer follows the protagonist, venturing into the story, a space that seemed desolated and scary at first, becomes a symbol of familiarity and warmth within.
As this concept started forming in my head, I automatically linked it to a personal experience, where i had been brought to change my perspective by someone, who then left taking almost all this new discovery with them: in my video, the protagonist suddenly disappears and the cottage is invaded by loneliness, but a small ray of light is still there, signifying the hope of always being able to learn how to change perspective.
Process
I started by sketching out the storyboard, which also helped me focus on one very important element of my narration: the color contrast. As I mentioned before, my story is told through opposing elements: the scary forest, where blue is dominating, and the warm cottage, where orange warms up the atmosphere. By itself blue feels very cold and dark, it evokes feelings such as melancholy and loneliness. Orange on the other hand is all about lightness, warmth, familiarity and innocence. However, when they are placed in the same shot, they create an unsettling tension between light and darkness, safety and danger, drawing the attention to the orange. This type of tension and contrast was ideal for the shots that compose my portrait.
After creating a shooting script to mark all the light placements and camera movements, I shot everything in a green screen studio. Later, I used Nuke to composite the footage on the environments I designed, using camera tracking for two of the shots where the camera was moving.
For the environments, I modeled the inside of the house in Maya, and included elements that I consider safe and familiar such as a sofa, a fireplace, books, plants, and childhood pictures. Instead, for the forest, I decided to use a Matte Panting. However, since my subject was walking through the trees in my scene, there would have been an issue of parallax. Therefore I decided to create the matte painting in photoshop and then export each tree on a different layer so that there wouldn’t be any parallax issues, as the camera could actually move through the trees in Nuke.
When studying Visual Effects for the first time, I was fascinated by its ability to create a bridge between fantasy and reality. This contrast is what inspired me to create Through Your Eyes, a piece where the narrative revolves around a contrast of two opposing feelings: warmth and fear.
As I was ideating the story for this short narrative, I thought about the journey of learning how to look at things in a different way. As the viewer follows the protagonist, venturing into the story, a space that seemed desolated and scary at first, becomes a symbol of familiarity and warmth within.
As this concept started forming in my head, I automatically linked it to a personal experience, where i had been brought to change my perspective by someone, who then left taking almost all this new discovery with them: in my video, the protagonist suddenly disappears and the cottage is invaded by loneliness, but a small ray of light is still there, signifying the hope of always being able to learn how to change perspective.
Process
I started by sketching out the storyboard, which also helped me focus on one very important element of my narration: the color contrast. As I mentioned before, my story is told through opposing elements: the scary forest, where blue is dominating, and the warm cottage, where orange warms up the atmosphere. By itself blue feels very cold and dark, it evokes feelings such as melancholy and loneliness. Orange on the other hand is all about lightness, warmth, familiarity and innocence. However, when they are placed in the same shot, they create an unsettling tension between light and darkness, safety and danger, drawing the attention to the orange. This type of tension and contrast was ideal for the shots that compose my portrait.
After creating a shooting script to mark all the light placements and camera movements, I shot everything in a green screen studio. Later, I used Nuke to composite the footage on the environments I designed, using camera tracking for two of the shots where the camera was moving.
For the environments, I modeled the inside of the house in Maya, and included elements that I consider safe and familiar such as a sofa, a fireplace, books, plants, and childhood pictures. Instead, for the forest, I decided to use a Matte Panting. However, since my subject was walking through the trees in my scene, there would have been an issue of parallax. Therefore I decided to create the matte painting in photoshop and then export each tree on a different layer so that there wouldn’t be any parallax issues, as the camera could actually move through the trees in Nuke.
Color grading was also a big part of the editing process, as it allowed me to match the footage shot in the same colored light, first, to the dark environment, and, later, to the warm one inside the cottage.
Below you can see the breakdown of the two main shots.