The Cube
short skit using visual effects
A weird afternoon for a girl casually walking home until a glowing cube is dropped from the skies. With nothing else to do, she fumbles with it, leading to an unexpected outcome.
This is a 30 second short film that was done individually in IAT 344: Moving Images class at Simon Fraser University. Through this film, I've learned how to create visual effects that include: A cube that glows, a laser beam, cloning a person, and a sci-fi portal.
Actor: Emily Chen, is a student at Emily Carr University.
Process
an overview of what I did for the project
Storyboard
With the idea in mind, I began the storyboard and moodboard to convey the tone and mood of each scene visually. The final result closely follows the storyboard but some shots were revised for the better.
Filming
I scouted out an appropriate location to shoot my film. This area was secluded as very little vehicles and people pass by.
However, I was unable to re-shoot footage as it was raining for many weeks. Weather should be checked early on or the filming could have begun earlier next time.
Directing
As the actor was my close friend, we we're both in a comfortable environment and I was able to easily direct her through the film.
However, she was also busy with school and could only help film on specific days. Hence, I was unable to re shoot shaky footage but used the warp stabilizer effect instead.
Visual Effects -
The glow effect is applied to both the cube and beam of light. To do this, I used the roto brush tool which creates a mask around colors that are similar to the one i selected. It was quiet hard to distinguish the white box from the ground because both were of similar color. I have learned that props should be in distinct colours for visual effects.
Post-Processing
I became familiar with the roto brush tool which was used to create a mask around the actor in order to clone her.
This was a single film in which the tripod was necessary. The actor did the three actions consecutively and I edited it to make it seem like she had done these actions with time.
