FIlming - Shot 1 (Setting the Scene)

In order to start filming, I first had to create a camera. I went to the top menu and clicked the 'Create' option, then 'Cameras' and 'Free Camera'. 

I chose a free camera to begin with because I wanted to be able to move it around and shoot different objects freely without having a fixed target. 

For my first shot, I wanted to build up a sense of surroundings to establish the setting. I original wanted to have the camera coming up from behind one of the volcanoes and peering out across the lava. 

I placed my camera in it's starting position by using the 'Move' tool. I also made sure that the 'Auto Key' box, next to the Timeline at the bottom, was selected and highlighted red too. By doing this it meant that it would automatically put in a key on the timeline whenever I changed something on the set. I gradually dragged by timeline along to a different point and moved the camera into a different position. I set several different key points on the timeline and used the 'Move' and 'Rotate' tools to get my desired camera angles.

I played through my animation using the play controls along the bottom, next to the timeline. However, due to the number of polygons I had in my scene, when I played it the animation was very slow so it was hard to get a proper idea of how the actual animation looked. Because of this, I decided to render the scene so I could see what it actually looked like properly.

To render the scene I simply went to the 'Rendering' option on the top menu, and clicked 'Render Setup'.

This opened up a new window which gave me the ability to choose the exact key frames I wanted. I chose to select the 'Range' option from the 'Time Output' section, and selected the frames from 0 - 100. I also selected the location of my file output and gave it an appropriate name. Once I'd done all of this, as well as making sure I had the camera view selected, I pressed 'Render' at the bottom right corner. 

Rendering didn't take so long for this as I had only made a very short clip. When I looked back at the clip however, I wasn't pleased with it. Firstly, the clip was far too short and the camera moved far too quickly into its next position. Secondly, the lava was animated too and was moving outrageously which I did not want to be happening at all. 

To solve the first problem of the clip being too short and the camera moving too fast, I added in more frames. I clicked the small icon next to the timeline, which opened the 'Time Configuration' window. Under the 'Animation' section I altered the 'Length' of the clip from 100 frames to 600 and clicked the 'Re-scale Time' option and clicked 'OK'.

 By doing this it gave me many more frames that would draw out the scene and make it longer, instead of looking so rushed. Back on the timeline I also moved some of my key frames along to make some scenes longer and so that they filled out the whole of the timeline.

For my next problem of my lava animating, I was slightly puzzled at first because I hadn't added any animation to the lava so I wasn't quite sure why it was doing this. I then realised the reason why it was animating was due to the 'Noise' modifier I had added previously. When altering the different aspects of the noise modifier, there is a small section of 'Animation' within it. At the time I must've seen no effect as I hadn't rendered it, so I must've forgotten about it and left it. So to alter this I simply went back to the Noise modifier and changed it so there was no animation, because it didn't work at all. 

Now that I had changed my timeline accordingly, I rendered the clip once again. This time it took much longer to render due to the amount of new frames added. I still wasn't entirely happy with the final clip, but I decided that I would be able to use some of it. 

Here is the clip:

As you can see, once the camera pops out from behind the volcano at the start, the lava still begins to move violently. This is because when I altered the effect of the 'Noise' modifier on the lava, I must've changed it at another point in the timeline rather than at the very beginning, so you only notice the effect later on in the clip. Additionally, the clip does go on for too long towards the end and starts to become slightly tedious due to the lack of change. However, I really wanted to avoid re-rendering the clip again because it took so long. So, I decided that I had enough footage in this clip to use as the opening, at the point were the lava stops moving. I would then just cut the end of the clip off in Premier so that it didn't go on for so long.