3D motion
Here is an attempt to put together a bunch of 3D techniques with 3d animation, directional lighting and a moving camera.
Put together front to back in After Effects, although I probably should have done the sound in Premiere for more control.
Too Too Much Work
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…
If I needed an excuse…
…to dress up pretty, I guess I could apply for this job:
In support of achieving a diversified workforce, consideration may be given to candidates self-identifying as belonging to one of the following employment equity groups: Aboriginal peoples; persons with a disability; visible minorities; and women.
I mean, somedays a guy just wants to self identify with his inner woman. I know I do… Mmmmmmm, chocolate….
Putting it together
Okay, here’s a first attempt to put it all together and create some sort of workflow.
- Major elements drawn in Illustrator
- Imported to After Effects where the effects were added
- Finished composition put into Premiere where major transitions, sound effects and the extro were added
- Exported using Media Encoder
I added the lightening effects from AE’s prepackaged fx. The lightsaber effect is from a plug-in courtesy of Video Co-pilot. Sound effects are all free downloads with the majority from theforce.net. All in all, about 5 hours work, start to finish. If I was to take any care at all, I suppose I could triple that figure easily, not to mention how much time I saved by completely ignoring any smoothing of the animation; I will save that for when I have a gooder idea…
Cat-ittude
C suggested I try some whiteboard animation so I set up a quick test shoot and started playing with frame rates and intervals. This was one of my last, using a .5 sec interval and a 10 fps playback, but after I drew the cat face, I got some unexpected help.
A cleaner attempt with story and plot:
Foggy, foggy night
The crossing was foggy. Slow-down-the-ferry, what f*ck was that, whose got the radar, foggy. But I saw a dolphin. Go figure.
We hung out with Stephen and Leslie’s parental units for a bit and got lost in a parking lot in the fog. You know those crazy weird parking lots some so-called architects are making that are senseless even in the light of day? Well, they are a hoot in a pea soup fog. If you aren’t familiar with the parking lot and you can’t see more than 20 feet except for glowing distant headlights, it’s better than Blind Man’s Bluff.
And guess what! We get to find the ferry this morning in the same stuff. If you don’t hear from me again…
Actually it’s much clearer this morning!
So it occurs to me seaplanes don’t fly in fog. So we checked. They don’t. That might make tomorrow’s return a bit interesting.
The ferry ride. Brings a new meaning to foggy. I really feel for the captain of this thing; he’s gonna be stressed by the end of his shift.
Met Tina Lynch at the ferry dock and did a whirlwind tour. Amazing, gorgeous, fantastic place. We almost talked ourselves into moving after I pick up the boat we bought yesterday… Oh. Wait…
Le Boat? La boat? Whatever
I met Debbie Peterman! I met Debbie Peterman! But more on that later…
YVR. Vancouver. The L.A. of Canada. And this weekend, boat heaven. L and I are here for my Xmas gift redemption: checking out the 2014 Vancouver Boat Show at BC Place and, more importantly, Granville Island, home of the floating portion. Boats galore! I was expecting a dozen or so boats based on the website, but there must have been over 50. Cats, tugs, trawlers, cruisers, lots of sailboats and a few ostentatious floating palaces. Oh, and a whole lot of used car salesman types… it was grand.
We spent the whole day there checking out millions of dollars of boats Fromm a 57′ Hanse with more beam than my apartment to a 39 year old CHB trawler that was perfect for 2 friendly couples. I took exactly one picture. It was a 50 or 60 foot power cat that was a palace on floats. Owned by an Edmontonian it seemed. Blech.
The lovely man from Island Cruising tried to talk us into a 40′ Jeanneau and the nice man from Jeanneau tried to talk us out of buying all together. The charter guy said charter, the sales guys said never put a boat in charter and the Catalina guy ignored us. It was fun, fun, fun.
As the day wound down we headed back to BC Place for the static displays. We chatted with Shari and Ian from Nanaimo Yacht Charters, schmoozed the authors at the book display and popped in to Le Boat to talk Europe. And lo and behold, there was my all time favourite customer service person: Debbie Peterman. Ms. Peterman works for Le Boat out of Florida and has been my point of contact person for all our European canal boat trips. She has helped make each trip the perfect experiences they were. And I got to meet her!
The next morning we popped back in to tour around again. Talked to Dawn at Cooper boating about the Broughtons and Alaska at picked up some flyers from real estate agents.
It’s off to Nanaimo on the ferry now and part two of the lets-spend-some-money January tour.
Clean up
Climbing Flash Show
The following was a page for the longest time but with the cleanup, I think it will be better suited as a post. It was originally done Nov 20, 2006.
In my spare time I’m working to rewrite VIRG’s website as a fun project cause their current one sucks. I made this as a header until I realized that every time you reloaded the main page the thing would start from the beginning. So for now it resides here. Enjoy!
OK. Well after all that it turns out when I built the SWF file I included autoplay. Since I no longer haver the source file it is proving virtually impossible to turn off the annoying music if the post is anywhere on the screen. So I moved it back to this page: Virg Slide Show
Movies & Conversions
I’ve posted a few things that tickled my fancy over the years and they have been in a lot of formats, .mov, .flv. .wmv, even some .swf’s. So given the rise of html 5 and a more unified mp4 system, I went back and converted most of them and have reposted them on two grouped pages:
Movies & Collected Funnies 1
and
Movies & Collected Funnies 2
Most were converted using Adobe Media Encoder CC, but for some reason the codecs for the ‘borrowed’ flvs wouldn’t allow any Adobe product to import them. So I turned to Handbrake, a lovely, lovely product; worked great.
I now also need to go and clean up the galleries as they all seem to (again) be using different formats and half of them don’t seem to work. Let me know if you find anything still broken.
Excitement
So last night just before midnight a huge crash was heard. I didn’t think much except that maybe someone was dropping off a bin (at the construction site) and dropped it too fast. Then the yelling started.
I hopped up and looked out the window and there were a bunch of cars and a couple smashed into Mark’s (our neighbour) car. I immediately thought there had been an accident and that the yelling was the typical resulting violence. I grabbed some clothes and headed to the balcony. A woman with a gun on her hip was walking below me and the cars were all now sporting police cherries.
Turns out that a bunch of undercover cops were working some drug thing when some poor unfortunate schmuck of a would-be criminal chose that moment to rob the local Macs. Needless to say, a police chase ensued and the wicked ice in front of our house spelled doom for Mark’s poor car. The bad guy’s truck took out his rear end and part of our much abused light pole (2012), and one of the unmarked police suv’s finished off his front end.
Excitement indeed.