The Making of "Home Movies"

this video will completely ruin our

latest short home movies so make sure

you watch that before watching this

we've never done a behind the scenes

video before but a lot of my favorite

channels do it so i figured why not

i'd always wanted to do something with

the dozens of hours of old home movies

we have on hand and naturally as a fan

of the blair witch project in films like

sinister and lake mungo

i find that there's something inherently

creepy about old grainy found footage

like this

the other goal for this project was to

tackle a problem we had with our last

short behind the frame

which was that the character engages

with incredibly creepy scenarios in a

rather idiotic nature

hello i knew i wanted this character to

do the kind of things that people

watching would be screaming at them to

do like grabbing a weapon or simply

fleeing for their life

all my previous shorts have been shot on

a nikon d3300 which is a good cheap dslr

i shot this film in 12 1 black magic raw

with the blackmagic pocket 4k

i'd heard a lot of really good things

about it and it was pretty fantastic

the only major light source we had in

the film was a quasar science led light

tube that we placed beneath the tv

to help light hannah we recorded all of

our audio in post using a rode video mic

which is what i'm using to record this

now

and it works pretty well

i sent this film to dennis nado who

composed the music for the film

he did a great job and you can check out

more of his work in the link in the

description he's done a lot of work on

other short films as well

[Music]

here let's see the film was shot over

four days

and due to kovit it was just hannah and

i in our basement pretty much all the

art you see in the film

including the massive otter if you've

noticed that was done by her

she also sculpts some of the creepy

masks that are featured in some of the

other shorts we've done

and she does great work on those too one

of the challenges we faced was matching

up her movements to the movements of the

footage on the tv

since we shot all the creepy home movie

footage that she's reacting to first

when it came time for it to look like it

was live camera footage of her

she had to do our best to match up all

of her movements and reactions

luckily she really nailed it after a

couple takes but it definitely did take

a couple takes and i'm sure there was a

better way for us to do it

the beginning and ending of the film

changed pretty drastically from how they

were initially

we shot this whole opening sequence but

ultimately that proved really

unnecessary and it killed the pacing

yeah you're awesome there are a couple

of effect shots in the film

firstly the face of the apparition

originally the figure was supposed to be

the shadow-like shape that was hard to

make out

but that proved more difficult than we

had imagined luckily

it was unusually easy to manipulate the

face in post because the old footage is

so poor and grainy

the way that i went about doing this was

using the clone stamp tool in after

effects

first i tracked her mouth and then i

went back with the stamp tool and

grabbed skin from her surrounding face

and painted over her eyes and nose

for this example i'm just messing around

i then had to parent the motion

of the clone stamps to the motion of the

tracker so that it followed and stayed

parented with the mouth

the last thing to do was to add a bit of

grain to the clone stamps

so that it matched the grain of the old

camera footage and blended into the

footage itself more

simplest of all the effect shots was the

box moving shot

all we did was shoot a clean plate which

is just a shot without whatever you want

to remove

in this case hannah then there was a

shot where hannah pushed the box

so to remove hannah from that shot i

just created and keyframed a mask that

blends the clean plate

and the shot of hanna moving the box

together so that the clean plate

hides hannah and only shows the box

moving the last big shot was the last

shot of the film

which actually took a lot more work than

the others hannah found a video showing

how to

animate still images to create a similar

effect to what we were going for

first we shot a handheld clean plate of

the background we knew we wanted it to

be handheld because it just

adds a little bit to the realism of it

then i shot hannah jumping up and

mimicking the movement the best she

could

so that i could capture a freeze frame

at the peak of her jump

and then cut her out and photoshop some

hanging hair down onto the freeze frame

so it looked right

next i did a camera track of the clean

plate which basically creates a ton of

track points so that after effects can

map

out the 3d space of the shot based on

where the points are moving relative to

each other over time

so i picked a point that was near where

hannah's body is supposed to go

in this case it was this outlet and i

dropped the cutout freeze frame of

hannah into the shot and parented it to

the outlet

this way the image of hannah is anchored

to the outlet and won't move around when

the camera is moving around

i added a mask to the box and the chair

at the bottom of the shot so that

hannah's feet would look like they were

behind it when she

starts to rise up to get the rising

motion i use the puppet tool and after

effects which lets you pick all these

points

usually you put them on joints so that

you can stretch out and manipulate the

image over time to make it look like

it's moving

i've never animated anything before so

this really didn't click right away

but i did a bunch of attempts of it and

i animated her a bunch of different ways

to varying degrees of success which you

can see here some are truly awful

but once i got something that was

passable the image began to deform for

some reason

i don't know exactly why this happened

but it gave me the idea to add this

distorted glitchy video effect towards

the end of her rising up

this not only covered up the problem but

it kind of hid the jankiness of the end

of the animation

lastly i had hannah drop both the box

cutter and the camera

the old vhs camera on a super makeshift

green screen

so that i could drop them into the shot

with hannah rising up

the mask i made earlier with the box and

the chair worked really well to cover

them up

so yeah i hope that just provided a

little bit of insight into

how we made this short and i hope you

enjoyed it

if you've seen it and i hope you enjoy

it if you plan to watch it