Sunday 4/10/20 - VFX Research

One very ambitious goal for this project is to give myself the chance to experiment with VFX editing, something I've become very interested in alongside filmmaking and cinematography in general.

I started my research by watching a collection of Youtube videos by a channel called Corridor, they specialise in VFX, stunts and filmmaking and have created a range of content. This was initially just watching the finished videos but I soon discovered their secondary channel where they post not only videos detailing behind the scenes of their work but also a series where they react to hollywood and more amateur CGI. In this series not only do they give their opinions on work, but they also give insights to how it was made, how to improve and tricks to filmmaking using both practical effects and VFX. They also do a similar series on stunts that wasn't related to my research though it's still very interesting to watch. All in all I found this to be very useful as it gave me a lot of advice which not only helps me understand the processes involved in many films but also an idea of what I'd need to focus on when it comes to filmmaking.

Here is a collection of some of Corridor's best work and here is the full series where they react to CGI and give feedback / insights.

I moved on to researching on specific ways to incorporate VFX and how to do it. Many videos were simply showcasing their own tests but I soon found one that fully explained the process to digitally replace someone's arm with a cybernetic in post and to place them in a different location.

A small selection of other videos helped to also detail other processes which I needed to understand in order to make this film shown below.

One thing I decided after this was that I was now going to change the original idea to show the small cybernetic device in the character's forehead, this would only complicate things and I wanted to keep things as simple as possible to give the ambitious idea more focus. I also decided that I'd purposely leave the hand I'd be replacing out of frame for most shots and when it is in frame I'd limit it to very simple movements.

I also browsed through the sites cgtrader and sketchfab to look at possible free models to use when it comes to rigging one onto my footage. This was one of the models I found, it is already rigged and has a surprising amount of detail for a free model.