Assignment 4 : Hero

We are to create a 1 minute video titled “I am a Superhero”. This idea is inspired from the American Science Fiction Drama Televisions Series, “Heroes” based on the character Hiro Nakamura who is a programmer from Osaka with the ability to manipulate the space time continuum. Likewise, we are to create a character to be able to freeze the time and to “perform” a heroic act – usually saving of somebody from danger.

To make it more interesting, we decided to create a 1 minute video titled “Heroes Training Manual”. This is a video manual target at people who had special ability and to teach them to use this special ability to save potential victims from danger in everyday lives. Below is the case study for reference.

Huang Shu was in her kitchen drinking coffee, munching donuts and reading magazine. While she was reading, a pot of hot soup was boiling on the stove. As time passed, the pot of soup was bubbling fiercely away.

At this time, she stood up and walked to the stove, with eyes still staring at the magazine. She stretched out her hand meant to turn off the stove but her hands went towards the hot boiling pot! Not realizing the danger she was in, Katherine stepped into the kitchen and witness this. She quickly freezes the time and stopped Huang Shu from scalding herself from the hot pot.

When the time was freeze, everything came into standstill except Katherine. She turned off the stove removed the pot off from the stove. Looking at Huang Shu careless attitude still reading the magazine, she snapped and time resumed. She left the kitchen leaving Huang Shu alone.

When Huang Shu thought she was going to turn off the stove, looked up and got a huge shock to see the stove was turned off and the hot pot was now resting on the kitchen table top.

Feeling puzzled and she still didn’t know what happen and pondered deeply.

The case study thus is completed and ends with a message to instruct everyone to practice the skill taught in this video.

Video Editing
We import all videos and edit them in Adobe Premiere. 2 scenes were shot separately with each individual shot to be merged using Adobe After Effects. This is the part we also experience our major problem when we tried to merge them together.

Problems Faced
When we first did the scene, we had Katherine to move in front of the freeze object (Huang Shu). We realized this was impossible as the masking done in Adobe After Effects will prevent us from creating the time freeze effect. Most of the Time Freeze Effect we seen in the tutorials have the object moved behind the freeze object and not in front of the freeze object.
Due to this unseen problem, we had to re-shoot the part where we were at the stove. To ensure we did not repeat the problem and prevent any more possible problems, we “split” the stage scene into half and making sure we did not cross over each other stage as this would make things easier when comes to Adobe After Effect editing.

The 2nd problem was due to the lighting. As we used digital camera, we were not able to do white balance. We learnt that each time a new take, white balance should be conducted to prevent any change of lighting (due to the sun movement and directions)

The good news was we were able to solve the problem by tweaking the brightness and contrast of the video to match the other half of the video such that it was more seamless. We also applied masking and feather technique to blend the 2 videos more seamlessly.

A stable tripod is important as well to ensure the background stay the same throughout the shoot. Any slight movement of the tripod would cause a major problem in the video positioning.

Reference:
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/timeFreezeCow.php