ABOUT STORY
"OCD is about sibling relations. It is about how mental illness could affect such relations. It is about the resentment, the loneliness, and the yearning to be able to really fight with each other as other siblings do. It is ultimately about different viewpoints between a younger brother and an older sister."
Hee-won Kim (Playwright)
DESIGN IDEAS
OCD is divided into two different worlds: the reality and the hallucinations. We used live location shooting and green screen techniques to not only create the difference between these two worlds but also express the scripts visually while telling the story. We filmed in front of a green screen and built an animated 3D world separately for those hallucination scenes. Then we combined them together.
The Animator, Mingxiang Ya, said [we really wanted the audience to have an understanding of when characters like “Robin” are struggling with what’s real and what’s not.] That’s why we settled on the multiple dimensions to express the level of the visual world. From 2D animation to a 3D imaginative world and 4D reality.
DESIGN DETAILS
The world of hallucinations: The main hallucination scenes are the Antarctic Iceberg and the Spa of Death, both were built by Unreal Engine. The advantage of using a game engine to build the set is that I can build a "world" that allows me to "walk" inside to seek better camera views. Unreal Engine is powerful enough to make everything fast, real, and exquisite. I could add any ideas that popped up in my head randomly or remove what I dislike. This gave me a lot of freedom to satisfy my creative ambition, especially in a short and limited production cycle.
Green screen film shooting: There are static camera shooting and moving camera shooting in front of the green screen. Because of the COVID-19 limitations, every actor did the static camera shooting separately in individual rooms. More details will be revealed in the below section, COVID-19 CHALLENGE. The scene for moving camera shooting was the Antarctic Iceberg. We chose to use a camera studio as the shooting location because it has a bigger green screen, better lighting conditions, and air blowers.
The photo on the right side shows how the different areas were laid out in the studio. As the production designer and art director, I was not only in charge of the virtual scene building but also the lighting design for all the on-site camera shooting. In addition, I have the responsibility of advising the director about aesthetics and technology. Therefore, I sat in the back of the studio and operated the lighting consoles. During the shooting, I offered real-time lighting based on the virtual scenes I made. In fact, the pictures camera captured are different from what human eyes can see, so I had to check the camera view through the main monitor to make sure my lighting fit the camera, not the field staff. Moreover, I needed to focus on the camera's movement and angles to make sure the footage we recorded could be easily motion-tracked and keying.
Here are two footages took in the studio:
Compositing: On one hand, I used Nuke to create the camera tracking for the moving camera shootings, then imported the .fbx files into Unreal Engine as the new cameras. Then I recorded the video in the virtual scene with these new cameras, letting me have a series of background footage that had the exact same moving track as the original footage taken in front of the green screen. On the other hand, I used After Effects (Keylight) to key the green screen off and keep the characters. Then I composed the background video and characters together. Finally, I used Premiere Pro to adjust the outcome video's parameters, such as brightness, contrast, saturation, image noise, etc., to make the whole picture looks smoother and more harmonious.
I also used After Effects to animate the prologue. Here is a short segment of the prologue:
The reality scenes: The reality scenes include the doctor's office, the coffee shop, the living room, mom's bedroom, Robin's bedroom, and the bathroom. All the reality scenes used static camera shooting, and the actors were acting in front of a camera with the scene built in the back. We set some furniture and props to make every scene realistic based on the description in the script.
Same as the studio shoot, I was also in charge of the lighting design for reality scenes. I used stage lighting equipment and stage lighting design skills to imitate different environments, making the scenes look just like in real life.
However, there are some exceptions, such as Robin's bedroom, where we had to send the remote lighting equipment and guidebooks to the actors' addresses and ask them to finish these scenes on their own because of COVID-19. More details about the shooting can be found in the below section, COVID-19 CHALLENGE.
COVID-19 CHALLENGE
OCD was produced in the spring of 2021 when COVID-19 was still spreading across the country. A few weeks before the film shooting started, several important crew members unfortunately tested positive for COVID-19. The high risk of a pandemic threatened the whole production team. Therefore, the Department of Dance and Theatre made extremely strict rules for all the on-site film shooting. Although these rules successfully protected us from being infected, they still made the whole workflow difficult and clumsy.
In addition, we were in short hands since the start of shooting of this project. All shooting locations had limitations on the number of people can enter; for instance, the camera studio did not allow more than eight people. If more than one person was going to share the space, all the people must wear masks, even the actors, during the shooting. That is the reason why Robin and Miji use scarves to cover their faces in some scenes.
Besides the studio, most of the shooting was taken place in the building basement which only allowed us to use five small cube rooms for each actor shooting and one big room as a control room. Because of the COVID-19 rules, no one was allowed to take their mask off except to stay alone in a closed independent space. The actors were only allowed to expose their faces while they were locked in each room. Once the actors took their masks off, the room they stayed in would be recorded. That means each cube room would only let its actor enter, anyone else was prohibited from accessing it for no tolerance. The cube rooms would be locked automatically once the doors were closed during and after the shooting. A different person was allowed to enter only after 72 hours of vacancy.
Therefore, our technology team built a hardware infrastructure that enabled remote capture and composition of performances from the basement studios. There was a computer with an attached webcam and microphone in each of the studio rooms. These computers can connect to both the Internet and a local network switch located in the control room, allowing their content to be accessed by a central computer in that room for compositing and streaming. In simple words, the shooting was similar to a Zoom meeting – every actor was a participant and they recorded themselves. Then the internet will gather all the recordings into one main computer. The production people could communicate with each actor in the cube room and check them through the monitor. That explains why actors were wearing earbuds in the play since they needed to listen to the directing.
The schedule made by the director must be accurate to who would be in which room for which scene with what props and furniture for how long. As the art director and lighting designer, I had to set up all the lighting equipment before the actors enter the cube room.
The hardest part for me was designing and adjusting the lighting without actually looking at them. Everything thing was checked through the monitors, which was totally different from what I did on stage. And I could not trust what monitors illustrated totally because every monitor has different performances. Therefore, I had to check back and forth between multiple monitors during the shooting to figure out which lighting was good indeed.
Further than that, I could not enter the cube room during the shooting even though they are just a few steps away. That means I had to teach our actors to adjust lighting remotely. Most of them had zero knowledge about stage lighting equipment, so they had to listen to my verbal instructions to make the adjustments happen. That usually took a little more time because they needed to walk to the equipment, adjust, and then come back to the previous position and let me check if the change works. Sometimes it took multiple turns to complete one adjustment.
As all the actors were separated into individual cube rooms, it became interesting when two or more of them need to appear in the same scene. We had to use props and furniture and utilized lighting to make multiple rooms look like different angles of one space.
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