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