3. Green Screen

Green screen is used in almost all films in recent years. It is used to be able to put subjects in almost any location a person can imagine.

I chose to do this work on my own as it wasn't as big a task as the visual effects composition.

Before I chose how to light my scene, I needed to decide on a back ground. The back ground I chose is lit from the left, with lots of shadows on the right-hand side of objects. I lit my set accordingly, so I would match the scene. I had an idea of myself staring into the camera as it slowly panned out revealing more of what was behind me, in this instance; as the camera would pan out, it would reveal more and more destruction.

The camera I filmed on was an HDV camcorder, mounted on a dolly. I chose to use the dolly to pan out rather than just zoom out so I could maintain eye level with the camera. The only set back of using this HDV camera was it captured with the file type ".mov" which I was unable to import to either After Effects or Premiere Pro, so to solve this, I converted the footage into a loss-less file type that was compatible with the software I would be using.

To key out the green background; I used Premiere Pro's ultra key tool. I found this to work a lot better than After Effects' key light tool, as with it; the shaded side of my face became transparent. Adjusting the pedestal feature within ultra key, I was able to get a near perfect colour removal.

Original Footage -- No Key

Ultra Key added, but shadow of me and seem of curtain
still visible

Ultra key active, pedestal setting at 100% removes
original background completely

The background I chose was of multiple destroyed skyscrapers settling in rubble, however, I wanted to make it look as though they had only recently been destroyed, so to do this; I wanted to add flames and explosives to different areas of the image to represent that they had been purposely destroyed, rather than destroyed by the elements over time. As my footage panned out; The back ground would have to as well, so to do this I key framed it's scale and blur from start to finish  to match the perspective and focus of my footage.

Even though I lit the set correctly, I still looked very saturated in comparison to the background, so I lowered the saturation enough to look like I could have been in that environment. The image also had a very small fraction of blue in it, so I used the fast colour corrector tool in Premiere Pro to add a similar amount to my footage.

Once this had been done, all that was left was to add the flames in the background, and to do this; I used after effects. As the background was now a moving image, I would have to track points within it for the flames to follow. I added individual coloured pixels to the background using photoshop, so that the motion tracker tool could determine what to follow easier.

Video co-pilot is a tutorial website that teaches it's users to use after effects and make they're own effects. It provides users with ready made effects available to add to their own clips, e.g. stock footage. Stock footage is a pre-keyed clip of things like fire, water, explosions, smoke, and many other things. I used some of these clips in my green screen to create the effects.

Once the final video had been made, it was brought to my attention that it looked like it could be used as a teaser trailer for a TV show. So to make it look more like an advert, I created a TV bumper which pops up to show the name of the show and the time it is aired.

Here is the completed video:

I really enjoyed making this video as I learned to use many new tools in after effects. If I were to film anything like this again; I would talk in the video. I think this would make it look more realistic because even though the video I recorded is actually moving, I only have very subtle movements which looks almost like a still image, whereas if I spoke; it would be obvious that it is a video clip.

2. Tracking

Motion tracking is used in films to allow an effect that wasn't originally in a piece of footage, to follow a subject point through a clip. It is easier to track a point that contrasts well compared to a point next to it, i.e. a black spot on a dalmatian.

For my tracking video, I had an idea of super powers. My first means of doing this involved tracking flames to points on my arm that I would mark with coloured spots. I did film this and edit it using after effects, but I was really unhappy with the results. It was a measly six seconds longs and as you can see, the stock footage I used was very cartoon-like and unrealistic:

After seeing this, I thought I'd try using lightning bolts whilst filming against green screen, using after effects.

I used pieces of coloured tape around both of my middle fingers to track and they worked extremely well against the green background. 

Once I had tracked both points, I parented two null objects to them. To add the electric, I used an effect called "Advanced Lightning" and used the two-way strike. This is where things became difficult.

There are two points in the two way strike: Origin and direction. Normally to make objects move with the now-tracked null objects; I would use the pick whip tool to parent an the object to the null, however, as this is an effect, and not it's own footage; I was unable to do it, so I had to use the expression pick whip to parent each point of the lightning to the POSITION of the null-- not to the null itself. 

Once I had figured this out, it became a lot more straight forward, with only minor tweaks needing to be made to the behaviour of the electricity.

Here is the finished video: 

If I were to film something like this again, I would spend more time on it to rotoscope around my hands, as in this footage, the electricity overlaps onto the back of my hands, making it look less realistic.

(Background for video created by Ben Reeves)

1. Matte Painting Composition

A matte painting composition is where a scene is built up of a collection of different layers to form one realistic looking setting.

Dylan Cole is a popular visual effects artist who has worked on many films, including James Cameron's "Avatar", £Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift", "Superman Returns" just to name a few. If you click on the link below; You can see some of Cole's work.

Dylan Cole's Demo Reel

Matte painting can be a very lengthy process, but can be done in either of two ways:

1. Filming against a coloured screen (Green/Blue). This allows the digital artist to separate the subject from the background easily (if lit properly) and lets them have more freedom over their surrounding environment.

OR

2. Filming on location and rotoscoping. This may not always be the case depending on where the footage is shot, or how many effects are to be added, however, when on location; there is a high chance there may be some unwanted people/animals or any everyday object in shot that will have to be rotoscoped out in post production. Rotoscoping is more often than not a frame-by-frame job, which at the UK standard of 25 frames per second; can be a very time consuming process.

TASK

Each member of the group could either work solo, or in a group of maximum 4 people, and had to film 20 seconds of footage of a person or people walking through shot on location, and create a matte painting composition. I chose to join a group of 4 (Myself, Dafydd Jones, David Terhorst, Matt Rowlands). Our reasoning for not doing the video by ourselves was so we could develop a more detailed composition by assigning each person a different job role.

My job was to create the matte painting, which I was really looking forward to making because I had never done anything like it before. However, to create a matte painting, you need to know what you're making it for.

RESEARCH

We discussed what kind of genre we wanted our composition to follow and finally agreed on a post-apocalyptic city. Next we did research on what kind of things may appear in this sort of area if ever it were to occur.

I had recently played a PS3 game called "The Last of Us" which is a survival game based in a post-apocalyptic city set 30 years in the future, only rather than technology advancing, it has deteriorated, along with the city itself. The pandemic in the game was caused by an outbreak of an infection, causing people to turn into zombie-like mutants. Here are some examples of how Naughty Dog, inc. imagine a post-apocalyptic city to be:

A once popular shopping area, now destroyed and riddled with
greenery

A main road covered with overgrown plants and rusty old

cars

A collapsed skyscraper with rubble and dust surrounding

it

A main road now flooded to car level and more overgrown
greenery

Playing the game and conducting this research helped a lot toward the making of our composition, however, we thought that the reason why there were so many overgrown plants scattered everywhere was because they had 30 years to grow.

To try and make the overgrown greenery look more plausible, we tried to film in an area with lots of trees, leaves and tall grass. These are some stills of some of the areas we chose:

Original plans for this area were to create a crater on the grass and add rusty cars around it with sky scrapers in the distance. When I tried this, the crater didn't seem big enough to look real. Eventually we dropped this location as we felt it didn't have enough depth in order to look realistic.

With this lake, we wanted to add rusty cars half-sunk in it and add road signs to seem similar to the flooded picture from the collection of "The Last of Us" photos. This proved to be very difficult to do as the wind was blowing the water, which would mean the water would react with the cars as it flows past them. None of the group were able to create this effect at this time as it would involve the use of particles. (Also the seagulls were a nightmare to rotoscope).

This spot wasn't planned originally. As we were walking back to the car we noticed it looked as though it could easily be made to look post-apocalyptic (because of the fallen leaves, the path, the bushy trees. However, once we looked back at the footage, we noticed it felt quite a lot like the first location in the sense that it didn't have a lot of depth to it.

So after a failed attempt of finding a suitable location this time around; it was back to the drawing board. We couldn't think of any way we could make it look anywhere near the standard of "The Last of Us", so the group came to the decision to set it closer to the present time, meaning that plants wouldn't be overgrown yet, but the place would look an awful lot worse than they do now, e.g. riot damage, vandals, abandoned. For this, we decided to do the opposite of the first plan and head to a location with buildings.

This was the final location we looked at and eventually agreed on pursuing. I used this screenshot to start the matte. 

I used photoshop to make the matte, I added things like a rusty zombie outbreak van, graffiti and and skyscrapers, but unbeknownst to me; you can add .PSD files directly to after effects and adjust the layers in there, but I had merged all of the layers together and blurred them and overwrote the original .PSD file, making it unable to tweak. This is how it looked:

This is what my Matte looked like, I was very proud of this as I thought it looked very good considering it was my first time doing something like this.

When it came to making the characters walk through shot, the group had to rotoscope around them walking past the broken wall and the van, but given this was our first time doing rotoscoping, it didn't quite go to plan. We used to many mask layer points around each person, making it incredible difficult to do. Here is an example:

As you can see; there are around about 200 points per character, which when having to adjust every single point in 500 frames, became more time consuming and began to hinder our project. It also created a shimmering effect around each person, which took away from the sense of realism. However, before we realized that this method was a difficult way, we had already done most of the frames, so we pursued it.

Due to complications of other work and meeting their deadlines, it became too much for the group to handle, so we agreed on redoing the video.

It was a very last minute decision, so we had to get to work fast. I began remaking the matte painting.

This is the new painting:

This time after having remade the matte, I knew to leave the layers
separate and was able to improve (I feel).

I was mostly proud of how this building looked after I edited it

This is what the final video looked like:

A video breakdown demonstrates the process at the end of this clip.

I enjoyed helping make this video, although it became very stressful toward the end. Looking back; there are many things I would have changed, although, if these setbacks hadn't have occurred; I feel I would not have learned anything. I would definitely like to improve my matte painting skills and possibly pursue it at some point during my career.

Self Directed Study Week

During the self directed study week, I had originally booked the week off work in order to get up to speed with all of my modules ready for when I return to lectures, but this was not the case. 

I work for a company called "BlockBuster" which for the second time this year has entered administration at the start of last week. Fortunately the first time it entered administration, the company was bought out and was able to continue as normal, however this time it is not looking as promising. The manager of the store I work at asked each part time member of staff (which I am) to work as many hours during that week as we possibly could so that we have some money to fall back on if we do lose our jobs, which at this moment in time it is looking as though I will, as I will not receive a redundancy payout.

This unfortunately resulted in me not being able to make it into University as much as I had hoped to during the week, but I did do some work when I got home from work at 10pm each night, meaning I was still able to help edit the group's composition by editing the matte painting to the other group member's desires.

On Wednesday night, my only means of working from home, my laptop, broke. Fortunately for me though, I regularly back up all of my work to three different storage locations; two external hard drives and a cloud server, so I still have everything I have done so far to work from upon my return to university. I have already sent my laptop away for repair, with an estimated 28 days to fix.

Research and Examples

Visual effects are used for making the inanimate and the fake, come to life. In recent years; films such as James Cameron's "Avatar" and Disney's "Tron Legacy" are the biggest blockbusters that have excelled at turning fiction into reality.

A scene from the film "Tron: Legacy" without effects

The same scene with Effects

Visual effects can create almost any background you can imagine. As shown in the pictures above from "Tron Legacy", with the use of a blue screen and effects software (Tron used Cinema 4D); The effects editor has been able to create a futuristic looking arena for this character to battle in.

Recently I visited Harry Potter Studios, which is a tour of the studios where all eight films were made. It contains props, sets and costumes that were used in the film, and one of the things it contained was a section dedicated to the use of visual effects in the film:

A small paragraph located on site to give tourists a brief insight into Visual Effects

One of the most interesting things I found during my time there was an unknown fact about the Great Hall, and that is; the ceiling isn't real. The ceiling you see in the film is a giant grand archway made out of curved wooden beams:

However, that would have been very costly to make, so instead; They built a small scale version of the ceiling recorded that, then matte painted it into the final footage.

The small scale great Hall ceiling.

During the eighth film, (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2), there is a scene where Harry, Ron & Hermione enter Gringotts Bank through a cave on a high-speed mine cart, which bobs and weaves through crevasses in an underground cave. Here is the clip:

As there are no places like this; it would be very costly to be able to build a mine cart able to follow a track that is suspended hundreds of feet above the ground that rotates 360 degrees with people on it. Enter Green Screen:

Here is the same mine-cart that is in the clip which is now on display

in front of a green screen in the studios.

The footage was recorded in front of a green screen and a matte painter created a background for the visual effects editor to to replace the green with.

The tour of the studios really helped me understand more of just how much time and effort actually goes into making films like Harry Potter look as real as they do.

Introduction

In the second lecture, the class was taught how to make visual effects on after effects and Photoshop. We were introduced to a man who specializes in visual effects named "Dylan Cole".

http://www.dylancolestudio.com/ 

Cole has worked on a lot of well known projects, including James Cameron's: Avatar. One of the many things he does that I have noticed he does extremely well is matte painting.

Matte painting is where you create a scene that is completely fake by either drawing it, or taking a real setting and adding things that weren't there originally, i.e. buildings, water, replacing the sky.

I had a go at trying to create a realistic looking scene using different parts of different images I could find online as a test.

I liked the moon a lot in this because of how unusually large it appears.

I wanted to try putting clouds in front of the moon to give it a sense of depth.

This setting is from the same perspective as the moon picture, and I really wanted to try and make daytime turn to night time.

This is the final image I made, one of the more challenging things I had to do was erasing the shadows from the walkway beams, they were pointing horizontally, but if the image I made were real, the light from the moon would make them be pointing vertically. 

For this module, I have teamed up with three other students on my course; David, Dafydd and Matt. We are each undertaking different tasks to (in theory) not only speed the development process along, but to make it the best it can be by each of us focusing on individual roles, i.e. Sky replacement, matte painting, rota-scoping.


Rotoscoping is a very time consuming job which involves cutting out a moving object as it passes through an edited portion of the footage frame by frame. For example, if a person were to walk through an edited part of the image for 10 seconds, at 25 frames per second, 250 individual frames would need to be edited. the group split this job between David and Matt as they had volunteered, meaning they both would edit 100 frames each if this situation were to occur.