503 - Closet Scene Test

As Mike previously brought up how long and boring the closet scene was, I decided to do a quick test to help get what's in my head down visually, as well as to find out a workflow for compositing. Here's the test of the scene:

I definitely don't think this scene will feel too long, and currently I think it needs to increase in length a bit to allow for better storytelling with the sound. It was quite a challenge figuring out the best way to do this due to the different camera movements as well as the shaky effect. I made sure to make the background very big, and did 3 different versions based on the lighting on the other side of the door. I then started by timing when the lighting should change, and after that was done I did the camera movements. 

A problem I had last year when compositing and using a shaky effect, was that if you work across several comps then the image is cropped based on the composition size, therefore if possible I wanted to keep everything in one comp. I also decided to use a camera rather than keyframing the background's scale, as this would allow to edit the shaky effect separately to the camera movements. The camera was fairly simple to do, but the shaky effect was challenging for 2 reasons:

• To use a camera, I needed to set the layers to 3D. This meant that a z position coordinate was added in to the BG layer, therefore when I applied a wiggle expression, it would alter it's z position as well which I didn't want. To overcome this, I first tried using this expression:
• w = wiggle(2,50);
  [w[0],w[1],value[2]]
• I wanted to keyframe the amount of shakiness as well, rather than just having it a set amount throughout. To do this I had to create a null layer and use a slider. The problem with this is that it wouldn't link to the above expression.

To overcome these problems, I split the position keyframes and added an expression to only the x and y ones. Then I could link them individually to the one slider, and use that slider to control both. This ended up working and gave me a lot of control over the shakiness of the image.

I think overall it worked out really well and the effect is pretty convincing. When I properly paint the BG, I think it will quite good and won't detract from the rest of the film. One concern I have is with the layout however, as this scene transitions into the next when the closet door opens, revealing the rest of the Girl's room. This, in combination with the lighting is going to be quite tricky to plan.

Here are the sources I used to help me with this scene:

https://creativecow.net/forums/thread/wiggle-xy-but-not-z/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAF1x1J1GAc&ab_channel=AdobeMasters