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.