In this project, VFX had to take a massive part since I wanted to convey a lot of drug intoxication and paranoia scenes through these visual effects. I have been doing these visual effects since four days now and I am finally done. The process was not just applying those effects but also trying it out on almost every scene and shot and figuring out which one I should use these effects on. I am attaching below the ones I used for my vfx:
Shot without the actor or the green screen bed
Shot with the actor lying down, smoking
Shot with the green screen.
After applying the VFX.
This is the one of the two scenes which was planned to have VFX, and the planning is evident as I took three different shots to transform it into one. Basically the way this scene goes is that my character is shown to be smoking on the floor and then he starts floating. It is an inaccurate representation of the intoxication of marijuana but my video only aims to replicate the effects, not portray them 100% accurately. What I did to create this is first put the green screen layer on top of the other two layers and key out the green colour of the bed, then fade that layer and make it less opaque as it was starting to look fake because of imperfect lighting, which really was not under my control.
Eye of the protagonist as he takes a psychedelic drug.
Camera zooms into the eye. This was done in post production.
This was the second VFX scene that was planned. My goal here was to insert this scene in one of the beginning few scenes to captivate the audience as it is such a fast-paced intense scene that it would not bore the audience. I applied the next scene in which he is hallucinating after taking the drug, on the eye as soon as he takes it, then I added a motion blur zoom effect into the eye to make it look like the zoom was done during shoot.
before
after
This was the scene after the eye zoom transition is applied. In this scene, the sky is in the background and it is all blue so I keyed out all the blue colour and added a colour flickering layer on top of it. This is one frame but in the actual clip, the colours change twice a second giving the effect of a psychedelic hallucination.
These are the scenes I applied the echo effect on, in post production. These were not planned but I am still satisfied with how they look. The echo effect creates a sense of intoxication, disorientation hence I used it.
Protagonist’s POV. He looks at the chair infront of him.
Protagonist himself, paranoid.
This is when the protagonist goes through drug withdrawal symptoms. This was inspired by the film “Requiem for a dream” and its scene when the woman is experiencing withdrawal and her vision starts distorting. This is what im trying to show too. The character is looking around and the lights around him flicker(which was also added in post by increasing and decreasing brightness every 5 frames), and his vision starts getting distorted. The second one is trying to imply that the withdrawal effects have consumed him completely, hence he appears to start getting more and more distorted too. This is to make the audience feel what the character is feeling.
sober 