One Hundred Ghost Stories: Behind the Scenes

By Helen Kwok

Some behind-the-scenes photos and videos of the filming for my Studio One final project: the One Hundred Ghost Stories book installation.

There was a lot of planning and preparation involved in getting this filming completed, including settting up a time with my filmmaker friend Alex; booking the multitrack studio space; hiring out all the equipment from AV Loans like the filming gear and data projector; and bringing in all my installation props and computer equipment. Just carrying all the gear and setting everything up took me a good hour before we started filming. Special thanks to Homie for helping out on the night and for all the behind-the-scenes photos and footage.

Overall, the filming went well, minus the few hiccups we had. I was able to get most of the footage that I wanted. Some issues that I ran into include:

• The Leap Motion not working at the start of filming. It just wouldn't turn on the tracking. A quick restart of the computer fixed the issue.
• The Leap Motion not consistently detecting the hand pinch motion, even though it worked in previous test sessions (although not consistently either). Something I'll need to keep investigating after the project.
• The Leap Motion suddenly stopped working after an hour into filming, for no reason at all. No changes were made to the TouchDesigner file or the Leap Motion itself. It just suddenly decided to stop tracking. Luckily, we were able to record a few successful takes before the Leap Motion started playing up. Didn't have time to troubleshoot this as we had to wrap up filming.
• The black wall of the studio was quite soft in texture - they're sound proof panels. Therefore, the wall projection image wasn't as sharp as the original animations, and left an interesting texture in the background of the animations.
• The refresh rate of the projector had to be adjusted to 50p Hz (as we were filming at 25fps) to avoid the flickering/banding/rolling shutter (?) effect in the film recording
• Couldn't figure out how to make cusp points of vertices in KantanMapper within TouchDesigner when mapping slices, which meant the projection wasn't 100% accurate as I wanted it. Will look further into this after the project.
• The slight difference in focus between the book and wall projections meant it was hard to capture crisp images for both in the video. 
• Getting the lighting right. We didn't want the room to be totally dark that we could see my hand and the table (but the total darkness gives a clearer projected image), and we didn't want the room to be too bright that we couldn't see the projections clearly. We ended up with dim lights on the lowest setting.

Luckily I had tested the projection on location two days prior to the filming, which meant I was able to get an idea as to what was / was not working. For example, I initially had booked in a portable mini projector thinking it was sufficient, but quickly realised it was not powerful enough. I also got an idea as to where things are located in the room, what could be moved, where to set up, etc. Also troubleshooted various things, like the lights turning on by itself during the projection when motion is detected. We fixed this by covering the sensor with a bit of paper and blutack.

In terms of editing, there was a lot of work in post-production in order to really bump up the brightness of the projections to make them clear. I did all the editing in Adobe Premiere. The editing process wasn't too arduous - it was just a matter of selecting the right clips and cutting at the right moments to show cause and effect (animation finishes playing -> candle appears -> my hand closes -> switches to next animation). I did run into a flickering issue with the exported video file (that didn't show in the preview within Premiere). After hours of trying to find a solution (trying to anti-flicker filter, pre-nesting, using export instead of Adobe Media Encoder), the solution ended up being switching the renderer in the Project Settings to Mercury Playback Engine Software Only.