Let’s see... Where did we leave off?  Oh, yes...  I was attempting to fix the plethora of fuck-ups I did while filming Colony of the Damned. 

I didn’t get nearly as much accomplished this week as I had hoped due to time constraints (the real world has a nasty habit of interfering with my playtime).  Also, the time I did spend working on post-production was seriously hampered by the fact that I have no idea what the hell I’m doing.  I was, however, able to gain a couple of modest semi-victories in my quest to make Colony of the Damned slightly less of a travesty in filmmaking.

First, I was able to perform some virtual dentistry on Victoria.  In one of the shots her real teeth are clearly visible beneath the zombie prosthetic.  I was able to mask them out in After Effects.  The stills below show the before and after.

Next, I had to deal with fixing Jake’s prosthetic.  The edges of the foam latex piece that Jacob was wearing were clearly visible.   So it was time to leave virtual dentistry behind and take up some virtual plastic surgery.  While I was at it I darkened up the sky a bit and added a fake crack in his eyeglasses.

  

And finally, I dealt with the last scene we shot where we lost all available sunlight. These are also some of the shots that were filmed with the wrong shutter speed.  I had assumed this entire scene was unusable (and by professional standards it still is), but I was able to actually half-ass salvage the shots.  First, I cranked up the exposure and tweaked the color a bit.  Then, to combat the extreme noise/grain, I used Neat Video’s denoiser.  While there is still a lot of noise in the video, it is remarkably better than I expected.

 

(...a tad dark)

(exposed, but noisy)

(exposed and a little less noisy)

I still have one more scene to shoot for Colony of the Damned.  Then I’ll be making what will probably be a lame attempt at color correction.  After that I’ll be moving on to sound editing.  And I will also be starting on our other short, Sole Defender: 5000 AD.  So, I guess what I’m trying to say is... I have no clue what next week’s post will be about.

NEXT WEEK:  ???