Although I have been a bit slack on the blogging front I have spent a fair number of hours in the studio and edit suite over the past few weeks.

After a total hiatus to the project through September I went back to working on the soundtrack in late October and screened a new version of the film in early November. This version was again missing the voiceover, it feels out of place every time I add it back in, I think I might stop trying.

The most positive feedback that I got was that at a number of points viewers felt they were lost in the images and could not gauge the scale, were they looking at stars or cells, and that this was immersive. It was noted that both camera shake and movement detracted from this as I gave subtle depth queues, breaking the illusion. This gave me the direction that I needed for the next phase of development. I have been working with the same cinematographer, Callum, on a new series of shoots to try and eliminate shake and movement.

Something that has proved to be very interesting in these experiments is that Callum has got access to a Sony A series camera that is able to shoot 120fps at 1080p. This has produced some spectacular images that I was surprised that we were able to achieve. The lighting setup has been the same, 1 hard source as far from the tank as possible, but we have experimented with some coloured gels, and white as well as black backgrounds.

We have also had success using a larger 300ml syringe and lengths of clear tubing to more consistently add the coloured or cloudy elements to the tank. Notable successes were; adding thinned white acrylic paint to the bottom of a tank of pale red glycerol, red ink suspended in glycerol under blue light with a white background, and slowly dripping a black ink/acrylic mix into water.

With the high frames rates that we have filmed at there were another 2 hours of rushes to sort, initially I was much more decisive discarding footage with camera shake, and even good sequences that had a focus pull (initially the focus pulls looked interesting as different strands and filaments come into focus, but the focus change often gives away scale).

With the footage sorted I decided to go back to an empty timeline and rebuild from memory and a fresh take on the footage the sequences.