Now I had to record the camera movement and think over how I wanted to place it around the scene. I also had to work on adding the gun model to the scene alongside rain. I decided first I'd add the gun since the scene needs it or else it would make the character's animations look very weird. I had no idea how to give a character a prop that they'd keep hold of so I had to find a tutorial for help on this. First off I imported the gun's model so I could resize it ready for the tutorial.
I followed this short and simple tutorial
The first step was making a new bone on the character's skeleton, this would be where the gun would be connected to for movements. I put this in the right hand as that is the one gripping the handle.
After that I had to go into object edit mode and essentially just attach the gun model to this bone by right clicking both and selecting parent. This means the bone is now the parent object of the gun. This was the result:
Unfortunately it was placed in the wrong location after doing this, though to fix this all I needed to do was re-rotate the object
There was still one problem after this, for some animations the gun would be slightly misplaced and unless I painstakingly went through each frame to make it the correct position, I had to leave it as it is. To avoid this being too visible in the film I had to make sure the camera angles didn't keep it in view when this issue occured. I also had the benefit of low light so it wouldn't look as bad.
But now I was on to the camera work, I had a solid idea of what I wanted based on my storyboard, research into 1917 and experimentation with the first scene. For the first shot I wanted a sense of symmetry by having the character centered but I wasn't sure if I wanted it zoomed in on the character's head or zoomed out to make him seem smaller.
Whilst I liked the close shot because it was more 'intimate' I preferred the zoomed out shot as I loved the idea of making the character seem small in this area. I was going to have it stay on this shot before a cut that was closer up and following the character. Whilst I wanted this to be in one take, I felt that if I used a zoom here it would move too quickly towards the character based on the amount of time. I decided to experiment with the zoom just as a visual reference so I 100% knew if I wanted to use it or not and this was the result:
Seeing that made me certain I wanted to use a cut here as I wanted to keep the zoomed out shot. So I have it cut to the camera in a similar position to my zoomed in shot shown earlier. I felt this way I could actually use both ideas. I was now going to have the camera following behind the character until they stop, where it would pan and dolly around them to give the audience a look at this person before they started walking again. One thing I noticed that when the camera stopped moving the scene felt weird, it felt so suddenly motionless. That's why I gave myself a rule to keep it moving in one way or another so that it never felt weird. If the character was still I'd often choose to have the camera pan around them or zoom depending on what I wanted to make the audience focus on. I felt like this movement helped the viewers to get a better view of the surrounding area to invoke the need to ask more questions to themselves. It's why I made the camera focus on the bear before the character when it came into shot.
But then I also had the thought to add camera bobbing to help make it feel more realistic, as if there was someone with this person recording them. It meant I could keep some still shots as they would still feature the slight camera bobbing. I decided to wait until the end however before adding this.
Most of my camerawork was relatively straight forwards from here as I didn't want super complex or crazy shots, just simple movements around the scene to show the enviroment. This was what I chose to have before adding any extra features such as the camera bobbing:
What I loved was the shot at the end as the very slow zoom alongside the flashes of lighting to me built suspense. It was remniscient of the very first scene and due to the length it gave the viewers time to think. I liked the idea of keeping it as a very stretched out scene just watching this character alone, heavily breathing. It was the opportunity for the viewers to realise what the film is telling them, that this person is the same person from the start and that they are going to die. A very grim realistation that leaves the film ending on a slightly ambiguous but dark ending. They won't know how they die still but they know that the were close to it. It plays once again into the idea of information.
Adding camera bobbing was pretty simple as I just needed to open up a menu called the graph editor, here I could see all the keyframes for the camera's movement. After this I just needed to add a modifier called noise, this essentially adds camera shake. To make it seem like the bobbing of someone walking I had to make some slight changes to the scale and strength so it is more subtle.
The left image shows it before the changes, the amount of spikes meant the camera shook very violently as if there was an explosion or really intense scene. The right image is after where you can see very small bumps in the line.
After this I decided to render my film so I could see the outcome of my work. However I ran into a problem, I had forgotten to add in the rain to the scene but the rendering process had taken a good few hours. If I wanted to add the rain I'd have to delay my work to wait for it to render. I decided to forgo the rain as I still had it in the opening shot and the film was already really atmospheric without it.
At this point I felt ready for the editing process, though I still wanted to film a few extra shots for the transition between the opening scene and the main scene. I decided I would work on that next as it would be relatively quick and easy to do. But otherwise I was proud of the outcome, I managed to get past a lot of my problems and still make the film as I wanted to a degree.