Building Intuition
My passion for storytelling and filmmaking was an accidental discovery for me. I was interested in performing arts ever since I was a kid, however telling stories with digital media came much later in my life. When I got interested in making films, I watched almost one film per day for 3 years of my grad school life. Streaming was not popular back then, so I used to rent free DVDs from the public library, and watch them one at a time. The great advantage of watching films on DVDs was that almost every DVD had a “making of” documentary that explained the behind-the-scenes process for making that film. For about 1000 films I watched during that period, I watched about 1000 documentaries on how films were made.
In parallel to watching films, I was also making films. I used to reside on the east coast back then, and multi-colored fall foliage was a unique experience I encountered in every fall. Since I was making a film in that weather, I wanted to show fall foliage in the film as well. So I wrote a screenplay to exhibit that, created a team, and started filming.
Making a film rarely happens in a linear fashion. You always work within the constraints you have. Whenever the location schedules, crew and cast calendars intersect, that’s when you film. Because of this, for this particular film, some scenes that appeared in the later part of the film, got filmed earlier, and the scenes that appeared earlier in the film, we had to shoot them later. Since we wanted fall foliage in the entire film, we had a limited number of months to shoot. The scenes that we filmed earlier in the schedule, we could get a good amount of foliage in the can. However, when the time came to film the scenes that actually appeared earlier in the film, when we showed up on the set, we realized that all the trees were leafless.
Now, imagine a story that is going on the screen in a chronological fashion, and the film starts with scenes with leafless trees (winter) and in the later you see fall foliage (fall). The continuity is completely broken. As an audience, no one would believe the film. The illusion will be rendered useless. We had a unique problem in front of us. We could not ruin the continuity of the story.
There were couple of ways out of this
Stop the filming completely, and meet the next fall.
Let the scenes be as they were, and finish the filming
We could not let both of these things happen to us. We had to figure out a way to add fall foliage in the scenes somehow even though it was not physically present on the set.
This is the power of digital filmmaking. Based on the documentaries I had seen on how films were made, I had also seen how special effects were created for various films. Although I did not know the exact process for achieving a digital effect, I had developed a strong intuition that it was possible based on what I had seen in those documentaries. Although the effects that were achieved in other films are not a result of solving a production problem like us, they were added intentionally. But the situations were analogous. Based on that intuition, I made a creative decision on the set that we are going to add the fall foliage digitally with a special digital effect. We took the shot.
After the filming, a figuring-out process commenced that lasted for more than 6 months. I had no clue how to add trees digitally, however I just had an idea that since all frames we shot are digital, you could erase background from the frames that we had shot, and then add a fake tree background in each frame, match the motion of the camera with the still background image, and you would have the desired shot. I recruited a team in India and a team in the US to manually erase the background from each frame of the scene. We did not even have appropriate software licenses to make it happen. We downloaded trial versions of photoshop, distributed the number of frames within the folks working, I standardized even the eraser size and the softness of the eraser edge, and removed background from all the frames. Then I worked with some professional softwares we had available in my grad school to add the fake background, and achieved the shot that we wanted.
Here is how it looked at the end. The video below starts with how the scene was shot on the set, to how it transformed later after we achieved the effect.
Some takeaways for me from this experience were,
Keep your eyes open to “observe” how problems were solved (they don’t have to be solved only by you, and also they do not need to be problems only in your domain)
Get in the habit of drawing analogies between what you are currently observing to what you have observed in the past. I continuously draw analogies between my creative adventures and my engineering assignments.
Build an intuition for problem solving. That intuition provides a great start for problem solving. That start is important more than anything else when faced with ambiguity.
Would love to know your thoughts.
