Week 13: Final Submission.

The final assignment. What a project. What a failure.

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It took a lot of work. But a lot of that was under the hood and split over a lot of days. In total, I lost much sleep, with numbers of all nighters, late nights, and all day stints. There were issues as I upgraded my system from CS4 to CS6, transferring things, and then of course the general issues that After Effects loves to do.

This is a good example of what my scene looked like at the end, with everything simplified into separate compositions per scene for simple positioning and final effects. I had to do a lot of grouping to allow me to add effects on top of the effects already there, but in per scene context. In terms of workflow, this saved a lot of trouble.

The first three or four scenes only had post effects, with a stack of colour correction, some grain removal and sharpening and a slight vignette that was set to a soft light blending mode. I'm not a fan of the crude darkening that decreasing the opacity on a masked solid does. It doesn't create as nice blacks, but none of the other settings really stood out as effective. Whereas soft light is a very subtle effect that I like.

What I ended up noticing is that After Effects has a very crude handling of blacks and whites and that if I wanted to do things properly, I'd have to manually mask and overlay multiple layers of effects to get what I wanted.

This sounded like a pain and a mess. So I went with what you see there, which is carefully balanced blacks and whites, slightly underexposed and a clear, slightly yellowed desaturation. The reds were pulled back and the cyans pulled up a bit. It's a slightly uncomfortable effect, and that was the idea. To make the viewer feel slightly uncomfortable in the establishing shots.

The glowing ball in the pupils and the dilate was tricky. While the process of the effects themselves was simple, I had to track each eye's rotation and movement. This took about twenty tries before I got a track to stick to each. The tracking was done on separate copies of the footage, one for the left eye and one for the right. Then I froze the frames, and masked out each iris, then parented them to the null that the tracking data was applied to.

This immediately caused an offset and stretching of the iris, I have no idea why, but either way it was annoying to have to fix.

The dilate was a simple bulge effect on the masked pupil. The spinning glowy thing was the Thingymajig from Andrew Kramer with a mosaic, inverted edge detect, and glow. Mosaic is something I particularly like for its versatility as a vfx base, as you can do quite a lot with that.

It was also used in the final two shots where cheap lens flares can be scene if you pay attention. This was done by crunching the footage down to a few bright spots, mosaicing that, direction blurring that, then adding a mosaic, inverted edge detect, mosaic and glow. Then some final colour tweaks. The final effect once applied as a screen and with the opacity lowered ends up being a controllable dynamic lens flare.

The lens flare has been bumped up for illustration purposes. As you can see, it's not blinding or all over the place. Though the surfaces that have a bright enough colour value to be a part of the flare seem pretty arbitrary. This is easy to control in the curves and colour section of the effect though.

In scene 6 you can see a track run off briefly into the distance before vanishing. I'm still surprised I got a track on the table given how little variation in colour and how much movement there was. I had to manually track the last bit, but still... It only took about ten tries.

The effect was done using CC balls, mosaic, edge detect inverted (sounding familiar), and a bunch of other stacks to essentially get the effect you see there. I'm a big fan of generative effects as they save me time and trouble, rather than manually doing it. Though I did mask it manually, it's a tad erratic, but it's like it's trying to find a clear path. And I didn't have much footage to it in. The next scene was impossible to accurately track. I tried several times but gave up eventually. Too much movement out of the scene.

The final render was done in Blender. I really don't enjoy rendering glass. It takes a long time.

Anyway! That's the project. I'm sure there were a bunch of other effects I've missed. The button thingys are all after effects. No photoshop used. The game was footage from Borderlands. I had a friend do the camera work. So thanks goes out to him. It would've been complicated on my own.

Audio was me.

The track was Circuit Hell by smartpoetic on Newgrounds. http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/111161

Week 12: FreddieW - VGHS

Video Game High School.

 

The epic series that everyone wished they'd made, but FreddieW and Co. actually went ahead and made. Showing off his skill at producing quality storylines, hilarious jokes and all round gamer comedy that couples itself with high quality special effects.

What's impressive about VGHS is how well it comes together. The effects aren't over blown, but they serve the movie well, perfectly suiting the gamer atmosphere and game based reality. And that's not to mention adding just the right amount of cheese, like a flying two personed rainbow cycle ridden by two bullies at the beginning of the movie.

This is one of those movies where the visual effects are an integral part of it. Instead of aiming for realism, there is a deliberate air of separation from reality. They augment the live footage so as to offset it from the mundane reality of non-game life. Granting the actors a larger than life vision when they're playing their games, but in the real life, fairly mundane.

Indeed, the VFX make a lot of reference to gaming. With debris and characters vanishing from the world soon after they die or hit the ground. Explosions are big and bombastic. Instead of blood spurts, fire and pieces of debris fall off characters when they're shot.

The colours are bright and clear, and in line with the slice of life style of the series, there is very little stylisation of any of the shots. Perhaps to grant a feeling of normal life to the viewers, rather than a stylisation of the world. This is, of course, deliberate, as care has been taken to allow for a proper amount of depth without pushing any of the elements strongly in any direction. Colours are quite clearly separated, allowing for easy viewing and decreasing the visual clutter; thus allowing viewers to focus on the action, rather than the backdrops.

Freddie Wong has never looked this good.

Week 11: FreddieW - Old School vs. New School

I could post almost any one of his videos. FreddieW is synonymous with youtube VFX. His videos have an excellent sense of humour and he frequently works with small time stars. High quality productions, the use of excellent VFX and a behind the scenes of most of his videos, mean that he is in many ways someone to aspire to as well as surpass.

This video and its behind the scenes show a lovely integration with live action footage and 3D effects, as well as the challenges associated with this.

Of particular note was the difficulty of shooting in public places. One is often asked to move on and apparently the team spent many hours running around the city being told to move out of places and not film. Of course as a video producer, Freddie was obligated to do as they asked.

Another was the usual difficulty of putting 3D footage into live scenes. One has to shoot multiple takes and hope that one of them works out well for the digital footage to be put on top, and any scenes with it in them need to be shot with that in mind. This becomes more problematic when the camera is interacting and zooming with an invisible object in 3D space. Especially rotating. It's time consuming to match 3D footage to camera rotation if you want to do it accurately.

The actual 3D models themselves, though well animated and excellently rendered, were hardly examples of difficult 3D modelling projects. Though certainly the number becomes a question of time.

This particular video also shows an excellent example of framing, where the Lara cosplayer was in a little box that made her look like she was in a spaceship, when in reality is was a duct pipe lookalike as revealed in the behind the scenes. The lighting and close scene compositing made all the difference.

Week 10: The Rock in the Road.

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A five year project by what appears to have been many many students was recently featured on CGsociety.

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/rock_in_the_road

The animated short, a small story about a boy trying to get around a rock in the road became a much larger project, causing many students to pick it up and put it down as a core team worked on it through most of time, even after their studies had been completed.

The animation looks like a slightly lesser quality pixar piece, with a few rendering issues and one shot where the apples in the cart go from yellow to red, then back again. But apart from a few technical hitches, the animation is extremely high quality and the storytelling as professional as can be.

What's impressive is that it was done entirely by students, even if the time frame was far longer than the usual a project of this scale would take. Though on student hours, that isn't surprising.

It shows, once again, the talent that a small group of dedicated individuals and time can show. It becomes even more impressive when they tell of how they built their own tools, a custom rigger and unified mesh system, and overcame a mountain of simulation and technical difficulties to put out the final animation.

As someone who is a generalist in 3D, I can see the quality of the final product, even though I may turn aside at some of the stylistic and artistic choices, some of these being technical, like the way V-Ray renders certain kinds of skin which I've never liked as I feel the clay look to be a cop out, and the overapplication of bloom in some shot; I cannot help but applaud them for the effort they put into something so large and to have pulled through after working for so many years. Sometimes the the technical process of creating these products is a long and tiresome one. In fact it often is. So it goes without saying that these people need all the pats on the back they can get.

Then there's the fact that they were featured by CGSociety, something will help the careers of those involved immensely.

Week 9: OFFF Lille 2012 Main Titles

A showcase of independant creativity, satire and what appears to be general fun while film making. OFF Lille is everything I wish I could create.

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/53323000" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> <p><a href="http://vimeo.com/53323000">OFFF Lille 2012 Main Titles</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/offf">OFFF, let&#039;s feed the future</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

The dev's clearly enjoy what they create, and the quality of the effects is impressive. OFF Lille takes a joy in satirising old action movies, Asian cinema and film in general. The overblown cinema noise and grain, heavy sepia wash and flattened depth manage to at once reminisce of films from days long gone and laugh at them.

The energetic initial titles and Multicolour logo reflect the old days when a presenter would announce the movie or studio loudly and Technicolour was a trademark used worldwide.

It only gets better from there. The majority of the film is shot with short takes, quick zooms and dramatic shots that make no attempts to hide the fact that they're being deliberately dramatic. Cheesy audio, confusing Asian villains that at once call up Hollywood cinema and the old Bond series evildoers, and a hero that hardly inspires confidence set the tone to an amused comedy. No attempts to explain the action on scene are made, nor is any character development done. But nonetheless, the sets, action, character customes and film angles constantly reference other cinema creations which those with any exposure at all will see.

Despite the deliberately crude construction, the camera work is slick and smooth, the actors get into their roles and the effects are very proffessionally done. The balance of dark colours and light is just right, the composition of each scene clear and well thought out, and the colour picking has been carefully chosen. Everything was deliberate, from the cheesy grease sound of the hero slicking his clearly not greasy hair to the overblown laughter of the villain who was clearly lipsyncing. 

That's what makes the video so enjoyable. It's carefully prepared by people who clearly enjoy what they do and want to have fun doing it.

Week 8 - Assessment Submission

Well, I've finally gotten around to submitting. It's taken a while, (A combination of sickness, unrelentingly busy life and work) and I can't say I'm all that happy with it. But I made a serious mistake trying to use the rotoscoping tool on camcorder footage.

Warning to all future vfx artists. Never. Ever. Use that with the camcorder footage. You will find yourself in hell.

But, me being the dogged person that I am, ran with it, and after what has to have been around five days of hardcore frame by frame rotoscoping, I got something that looked like a dogs breakfast.

Nonetheless, it was an interesting experience, and once I can get to the more functional parts of using after effects, things become a lot easier, the process of creating something that looks excessively kiddish entirely in after effects (with initial cutting in premiere) was a tricky one, but it seems to have worked.

The rotoscoping tool is quite powerful, regardless of my irritations, most of it's limitations revolve around edges where the colour differentiation was minimal. In a white black contrast situation it would run perfectly. It's intelligence is selective, sometimes it does what you wanted, other times it seems to do the exact opposite. Even in situations where the colour differentiation was minimal, different shades of black, for instance, it still ran like a champ, but required hand painting of the edges. Since I couldn't find a way to change the brush, this was a bit like wielding a sledgehammer for something a rapier would have been more appropriate for. I'm personally just happy I was able to rotoscope a hand mask. Holy **** that is a pain in the rear end. A combination of poor footage, movement, glare burnout, and poor pixel resolution, as well as a chugging program, meant that the process was a slow, and painful one. I went through many episodes and films while waiting for the tool to generate for each frame, I can tell you.

So. Things to learn for next time.

Greenscreen.

Greenscreen.

Greenscreen.


And ummm. Shoot in hi-def with a proper camera, anything with a proper lens. The hi-res footage, though slower to work with, allows one to work with a much higher information base, clearer footage, and a generally produces better results, faster. Additionally, colour shifting with footage like this is miles easier.

Youtube video here.

Week 7: Dubstep Guns

I'm not going to lie. I just like the VFX in this video. They're overblown, and CorridorDigital have worked with Red Giant in promotion stuff for a while, so this is easy stuff for them, and as a few other youtubers have proven, they can be replicated.

But who cares, it's bombastic, dubstep and laser guns. With cheesy characters and a hit squad called The Drop. The effects are very well integrated, flowing to the beat, with the camera jittering along with the dubstep music. The timing would have been difficult, and the footage was shot with the VFX in mind, which when doing anything digitally, is an important factor to keep in mind. Knowing what's going to be in the schene beforehand keeps you from needing to reshoot and allows for the best integration of the two.

The stylising of character introductions is a nice touch, with retro neon colour swipes putting the characters into dramatic pose make for an amusingly over dramatic entrance. Actually, all the characters are introduced individually, with one pair getting a Mortal Kombat style flames and axes entrance.

What's interesting is that this video spawned an inspired video, despite having no plot, correlation or really anything except bombastic special effects and clever shooting.

This was done by another youtube group, PVQvideo who, while having fairly overdone colour correction shoot an interesting story of combat, mind trips, and imagination all the the beat of dubstep and other electronic pieces. Obviously inspired by the music and taking the CorridorDigital effects a step further. Indeed, they reference their sires by putting a clip from Dubstep Guns in the video and using it to push the plot forward, however crudely.

Either way, once again the much hated music genre has spawned yet another colourful and amusing movie depiction. It's strange how something so hard and grungy could spawn so much colour. I guess that's human interpretation for you.