So here is my latest attempt at making movies. I have to say this is way too much work for the quality of final production. I think I put in about 30 hours in total (hence the lack of posts the last couple of days—I’m counting this as three posts…) and it still needs a whole lot of detail work. You can see why even short films have such a long list of people who work on various tasks and parts of productions.

Anyway here it is:

Production Notes

I started out creating the shadow figure in Illustrator again and importing the paths to After Effects for animation. My first attempt was using 10 separate shapes (2 for each limb, a torso and a head). Then I started to animate him, but soon realized I was no where near good enough an artist to be able to create all those poses from my head.

I grabbed my iphone, tripod and an umbrella and filmed myself going through the light sabre sequence, imported that into the AE timeline and started tracing using the shapes. Unfortunately the multiple shapes created a lot of work trying to keep everything aligned and, as you can see from the first 10 sec or so of the shadow figure’s sword fight, it creates a lot of gaps I would have to go back and fix.

I decided to redesign the figure in Illustrator, making him all one path (well 2 if you include the head) and start again. Rather than abandon the many hours I had already put in, I just started from where I was, so you will see a transformation in the figure’s shapes and consistency about half way through. This process was punctuated by a lot of Googling and video watching about rotoscoping and keyframes (and a lot of unhelpful screen hogging by Artemis). Eventually I finished the frame by frame rotoscoping and then realized, duh, I should have done the light saber itself at the same time.

So I went back and did it again. At 29 frames per second times 30 seconds, that is a lot of frames to go back through. Somewhere around there I switched to 10 frames a second for my sanity’s sake. The light saber shape—just the handle part—took about 4 tries to get animated. The first two times I tried to maintain the perspective, lengthening and shortening the handle as it moved in three dimensions, but I kept losing my tracking and somehow my previous work would then suddenly be off by a few inches, necessitating me doing it over again. By the 4th attempt I figured out how to just rotate the shape and move it along a path so I stuck with that. Not Star Wars quality, I know…

After that was done, which was the bulk of the aforementioned 30 hours, I added the actual ‘light’ to the saber using a great effects plugin. At this point having the umbrella on the original background footage was a godsend for measuring perspective. The plugin does some auto-reshaping based on motion with a lot of options to go in and manipulate it, but I decided to leave the auto default. It’s not that bad. Really.

Once that was done I added a intro and final sequence to try and add some story. The shapes again came from illustrator and I worked on trying to morph the ‘standard’ shadow figure to the animated one based on the video clip. A lot more video tutorials and Googling. As you can see I had varied success. A little bit of lightening, some experimentation with transitions, a bit more animation of the arrow into the light saber and I had an, albeit bad, storyline.

Next step was to export the combined working files into Premiere. Titles, sound effects, background music was all sloppily added (because I was tired… been walking all day…) and I was ready to render the final version. Posted above is the 800px version, but I have an HD quality one and its pretty damn sharp.

All this to say again, man, video effects takes a lot of time, even if you aren’t paying attention to detail. I think I should go back to writing nonsense posts again…

Note: I was dissatisfied with the rush sound-job I did, so I went back in and added a few more sound effects. Below is the original if you care to compare…