Altered States - Thermal Film artist response

Moving forward from my thermal film research, I decided that I wanted to try and create my own.

With the videos that I used for inspiration I was aware that they used thermal cameras to create the effect they have, but they cost a lot of money.. money in which I do not have. Therefore, I took to the Internet to try and discover how I could re create this kinda of style myself, all in post production.

I took to YouTube and found a very useful tutorial on how to recreate this effect, being inspired by brockhampon, an artist that I have researched and been inspired by for this project.

https://youtu.be/aJyMrOhBgSM

I followed the same steps presented in the video to create my video.

Here is the video before editing :

I made sure to have the background a solid colour (such as a green screen) so that the background could easily be isolated to make it a different colour from the person in the video.

I have not had much practice using after effects as I usually use premier pro, so this was a learning curve for me as I had to understand different tools that you can use in after effects to create this piece. I had a bit of struggle at the start getting my head around the layout etc, but after some practice, I understood it a lot more.

I used after effects to creat ether saturation style over the video. To do this, I created two copies of the video, I then placed the 'colourama' tool over the bottom layer and made it rub blue, making the whole video blue. I did this as with thermal film the warmth is usually mostly shown on the person rather than the background as a person will have more warmth than say a wall. I then selected the person in the video throughout the film on the layer above, and then applied the colourama tool again, but this time experimented with the Rgb wheel, making the person saturated. I played around with the warmth settings until I felt it looked most accurate to a thermal camera.

I then exported the video and took to photoshop to create a gradient bar. I took a screenshot of the film to get the colours so I could easily identify them to put in the wheel. I did this and put a gaussian blur over the bar to create a blended bar. I then simply placed this onto the film in premier pro.

Overall, Im pleased that I was able to figure out how to create thermal film without a thermal camera as I have wanted to try this. I wish the clip I made was longer though. Moving forward I will experiment more with different gradient maps, such as purples and oranges like the 'my love' video.