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.