production diary. killing time 3: Thinking with Portals
with how the project is coming along i had decided to use this time to look into the meat of what the project will be centred around; teleportation. From the script of "killing time" the story seems to be focused on some form of time traveller who is sent through time to arrest fugitives who can travel through time aswell. The main concern i have is that teleporting has taken many forms in tv and cinema and to create my own teleportation effect without making it look too familiar to other effects would look very tricky.
starting off with both the original and 2nd Terminator film. In the first film, the actual teleportation is witnessed off camera but is visually seen from the surrounding area with gusts of wind and streams of electricity. in terminator 2 however, we see what causes the disturbances, a large black hole like object that enlarges and flashes to white revealing the teleporter; the t-100.
The thing is a teleportation does not have to be a fashly show, take the film Jumper for example in which the teleporter, david, suddenly pops into the place he wanted to teleport to, however this affects the surrounding area such as moving objects out of the way and even smashing mirrors.
One form of teleport that i seem to really like is how thanos in Avengers: Infinity war teleports to different locations using the time stone, in which a small ball of light suddenly turns into billowing smoke and lightning with thanos walking through the smoke.
To actually have a teleport scene to be edited into the project however, a few things would be needed. such as what is known as a backplate, which is basically the scene without the main actors or no actors depending on the shot and an entrance shot, which could be the actor just standing there, jumping into the shot or looking delirious, depending on what the director would want. thanks to this tutorial, this has provided me a starting off point into editing a large scale effect for a large project such as this.