Smoke Experiment

My main scene in the caravan is the most important scene to create the mood of the video. It will provide the idea of them doing drugs and drinking, through the props. One of the main representations of this will be the hazy smoke to set the scene. So I decided to film a friend in my garage. I set up some props that would be in the video and had someone blowing smoke in front and around the camera to see how it would look. I also played around with different lighting approaches, to see how the smoke would look.

  

             

What I have learnt through this experiment was that the smoke looks really good on camera but when someone is blowing smoke in front it looks a bit too staged ad not natural. You can tell someone is blowing it intentionally for the video. In a realistic scene where something has been smoked in a room the smoke would not be really moving. It would be steady, flat and hazy in the room. I need to think of an idea to make it like this. In this case I am going to use a smoke machine, fill the room with smoke, let it settle and then shoot. When it starts to clear I will repeat this to make all the shots look the same. As the movement does look good, I figured the smoke will move with the natural current in the room, so if captured nicely, the smoke will be really effective and a great addition to the mood in the caravan.

I have also learnt through this that smoke looks really good in the light. So I am going to set up multiple candles around the caravan. Also to get a hazy light beam, I will add big lights outside the windows, creating a beam through the rips in the curtains, which will create smoke beams, that'll look beautiful visually. This picture is an example of smoky light beams that would be created in my shot, but the difference is the light would be coming through the curtains into the hazy room.

Also I have realised hand held shots looks unprofessional, as I have noticed shaky shots in this short sequence. I don't want this in my shoot. So I have made a note to research some camera movement techniques and camera equipment.

Also when I was playing around in the edit. I was trying different visual effects to make it look like she was drunk or under the influence of a substance. A really good technique I tried was duplicating the video clip, then putting the top layer to the right a couple of frames and dropping the opacity to half. Doing this creates a lagged, delayed kind of effect which could enhance the feel of her being drunk. Creating realism as it connects with audience by representing her delayed vision due to the drink/substances.