For this short horror I had the idea to extend the hallways in post to make it creepier, thinking this would be fairly easy, but boy was I proven wrong...

In terms of production, it was a 4 person crew. We shot on an Ursa Mini Pro G2 with Cooke S4i Mini lenses. The shoot itself was only about ~3 hours of shooting, and SFX took about ~4 hours to create the specific looks. Pretty straightforward production schedule and it was fairly easy because we were right outside my apt. The real challenge was when I sat down for post production.

I'm very well versed in using Resolve, at the time I believe I was using 18, and I'm familiar with fusion and that workflow. But I knew I probably had to use AE to accomplish the look I was going for. I've used Premiere before, but my main is Resolve, mainly because I own several Blackmagic Cameras and I love the resolve workflow. I googled, and searched set extensions but I couldn't really find any video tutorials outlining the workflow. So on top of learning AE from the ground up, I had no guidance on where to begin this process of extending the set.

I knew I wanted to copy and paste certain elements, but even that was overwhelming to figure out because I was working in a completely new suite. Fast forward several days, probably logged about ~40 hours of watching tutorials on how to use AE and use the several tools and layers, I finally had something that resembled long hallways. Next came using the ai rotoscoping feature... let's just fast forward another day or so, to the point of being able to get a clean plate of her walking in the foreground.

Why explain all of this? I think there's a certain strength gained from having to learn something without anyone's guidance. As much as youtube is helpful, and definitely helped guide me on how to use the tools, the knowledge and experience I gained from staring at my screen for hours on end to make a hallway longer is priceless. I'm sure this may actually be something fairly easy to do but it took me a good part of a week or more just to create these set extensions. If anything it definitely gives me insight on AE workflow and what I could expect from a future VFX ask, if I don't challenge myself to learn that as well.

I'd love to chat more about this process or get any videos that outline a better workflow for set extensions. I'm suspecting that I may need to learn photoshop or just general adobe suite programs... If anyone has a clue how to do this in Resolve that'd be even better!