It does not look pretty and that’s the entire point.
The film I am making relies somewhat heavily on practical effects to sell the world of the story. And as with about 90% of the things related to this project I have no idea what I am doing so I can only rely on extensive prototyping or testing to collect experience and ideas. The hope is that after enough rounds of trial and error I will be able to build something functional and cinematically pleasing.
So far the process with the physical props has been to sketch the ideas on paper first and then move quickly into building something rough but somewhat functional to see how the object will look and behave in the real world.
I have to confess that the initial build part of the process is the one I enjoy the least as it is where I am most out of my comfort zone and have to endure constant failing, learning, trial/error, self doubt and other minor and major frustrations. But having just kept on pushing forward I have so far always reached the point where things start looking better and the pieces fall together. At that point a wave of happiness washes down the black cloud of doubt and frustration. For me seeing my ideas become reality is probably the closest thing on getting high without chemical assistance.
And once the dust has settled and I have a prototype on my hands, I can put myself into a mode for critique and figure out how to improve my design. It is much easier to get those ideas from an actual object rather than looking at the plans on the paper. Also I suck at drawing so my sketches never look like anything that I end up building.
I try to make the prototypes good enough so that I can take them out on location and make a simple test shoot with the proper camera and lenses. After gathering enough learnings I can build a version 2 that hopefully will also be the final version as there just is not enough time in the world for me to keep on tinkering.
The prop
The thing I worked on this weekend is a creature called The Commoner which as the name tells, is a common sight in the in-story world. It is a faintly glowing little thing, covered in branches and other organic material found in it’s surroundings. The name also refers to the creature’s hierarchy among the other creatures. There is more to it than that but let’s keep the spoilers to a minimum for the time being.
This is the simplest thing in my screenplay but even this needs quite a lot of attention to details as I learned today. It is one thing to dream up something, another thing to build it and a third thing to make it actually suitable for taking out to a film shoot. But this is why I am doing these prototypes, to iron out as much of the issues as I can.
In pictures
Testing the setup with a 9v battery. For some reason I get much smoother fades with the battery than when I am running this setup from USB. No idea why and I have no time to research the reason but I am happy that it works this way instead of the opposite :)
I made the prototype out of copper wire, sticks, branches and some wool from a craft shop. For the next version I am going to get rid of the copper wire structure and use fresh birch branches instead. Also it should be more layered and thicker to give a better effect.
The wires need to be wrapped better and Arduino + the LED driver could be encapsulated with the controls (potentiometer + a button) so that they are easier and safer to manage on location.
Using Arduino as the microcontroller and Adafruit 24 channel LED controller to drive the LEDs. I could add much more LEDs but it seems that 4 is more than enough to produce the desired effect and enough light.
The code is pretty straightforward at the moment but I am thinking of creating a couple of pre-programmed animations that I could change by pressing a button and also a fully manual mode where I could control the LEDs with a potentiometer. All of that would give lots of freedom on set if things don’t go as planned.