Shooting for Scale

For scale I had initially planned to create the illusion of a tiny person walking through a patch of grass, however this would've required a session in the green screen studio, which was booked throughout the entirety of December meaning that I had no choice but to work around the problem. 

I wanted to tackle the issue by using a pop-up green screen, but the stormy weather may have been a risk to the equipment. Taking heavy inspiration from watching an episode of South Park, I decided to attempt increasing the size of a guinea pig. It was hard to find images for my moodboard, so it mainly consists of images from the episode accompanied by a Photoshop edit that I found on Google images:

I've always heard the saying "never work with children or animals" and was unsure if this would end up being a waste of my time. As I was creating the mock-up I quickly ran into a few issues; the mismatch lighting, creation of shadows and making the guinea pig look like it belonged within the environment.

Luckily I have eight guinea pigs at home and when it came to the shoot a few of them were very cooperative for cucumber. As this was merely experimental to begin with, I filmed with my own camera in an attempt to avoid wasting time as I could quickly export and review the footage without worrying about the deadline for returning the camera.

This paid off in my favour and I was able to establish which guinea pigs would be suitable for filming the real shoot. As shown in the screengrabs above, some of the guinea pigs were overexcited and sometimes moved too quickly for the shot to work. On the other hand, one of the guinea pigs behaved well and I was able to use her for a re-shoot with the P2HD camera.

At this stage, I also needed the woodland footage for the background - as I was worried about the rain damaging the university's cameras, I unfortunately had to film the shot using my Canon EOS 1100D rather than the P2 - which doesn't shoot in raw. I tried to capture various areas of the woods to later make it easier to work around if my initial recording was deficient.

The post-production process ran fairly smoothly as the composition worked well. Although I would've liked to attempt creating this shot in Nuke, I chose Adobe After Effects as I didn’t begin editing until the Christmas break and the free version of Nuke is limited. After discovering the importance of lighting through creating my mock-up, I took extra care in trying to match the back plate. The shot came out better than I had planned, but I can tell that various aspects prevent it from looking professional, such as the grainy video quality. Treating the cucumber as a separate layer, I tried to edit its appearance to look like she was eating a log (similar to those on the right-hand of the shot) in an attempt to emphasise her size.