Personal work

This is some of the work that i started at the beginning of this term as i did not understand the brief properly and started working on my hone and only joined a group later during the term

idea:

I wanted to make a fighting sequence so i have asked one of my friend that has been learning kung fu for many years to do some few move in front of the green screen with his sword(fake by the way).
The idea was to compose him in the forest fighting some kind of smoke entity with amagic sword
after finishing the green screen recording the next step was to the background footages. I went to abbey woods it was not as big as my first choice epping forest but it did the job

story board:

some of the drawing i started for the story board

green screen snapshots

background snapshot

reference:
 (movie storm warrior by the pang brothers 2009) this movie is the main inspiration for the type of work that i was trying to create but of course the standard and quality of special effect in this movie is way out of my league but it give a good example of what i was trying to do





another movie that inspired me for its dark mood (harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban)

another nice composition and maybe the way to go for the sword




research and bibliographie

Steve Wright : compositing visual effects and digital compositing for film and video
Trish and Chris Meyer after effect arprentice
Chad Perkins how to cheat in after effects

video tutorial : Linda after effect tutorial

Compositing

most of the compositing work that i did was unfinished so i have no video to show but i will reference my explanation with snap shot from the project files.

The first thing i did was to convert the footages to the apple 42(HQ) codec using Streamclip a convertor that was introduced to us at university as this codec is more suitable for editing footage.

The first shot i worked on was the intro after looking at the story board i decided that the short could not start like that so i decided to first compose a shot where the camera would fly thru trees in the forest and reach the destination where the swordsman is meditating. I all ready had the background footage and some pictures of tree that i took in the forest to that i added some pictures of trees found on the net i photoshoped the images that so there background were removed and imported the trees in after effect





background with some colour correction to go toward a blue tint

background plus trees added

i added some adjustment layers to try to balance the over all look of the shot

I created a camera and converted all the layer to 3D and moved the trees at different location in Z space so that i can move the camera true them

Top view

this is as far as i went on this shot

Second shot green screen keying

i started experimenting with the green screen shot when shooting i didn't take in account the floor and the reflectivity of the sword those 2 element made it very hard to key out my actor
i first imported the footage to after effect then created a red solid as background to help in the process


Keylight on it s own didn't do the job i added a colour range effect and drooped the fuzziness to zero to allow me to cut as much colour information as possible and putted it back to 12

result not perfect i almost lot the sword but that was to be expected and i was planing to replace it with blue flames....

composition with background footage

caracter colour corrected i reduced the amount of red to try to balance him with the background and the brightness and contrast

another experiment with smoke added

I also looked at particle to animate the smoke entity but didnt reach the experimentation stage.

Group Work

Project: Trolley bash

Plot

A cg character named Moom go to a shopping centre unable to reach one of the items on his shopping list Moom decide to jump in his trolley so that he can reach the to shelf but his trolley rapidly get out of control and he found himself travelling around the city unable to break and Moon end up crashing head first into a billboard

genre: comedie

style: early 1900 mute black and white movie like modern times 1936 movie by Charly Chaplin

personal contribution

01_ Texturing

Moom

we wanted the character to look like he came out of his house in an hurry not properly dress with pyjamas and still wearing sleepers for the skin the chosen colour was blue as it will show more contrast when converted to black and white

 Moom unwrap UV textured using Photoshop

 Moom textured using Photoshop

in term of material i used a blin to witch i changed some of the attributes mainly the reflectivity and the specularity

some poses made to see how the character look with the texture on him

trolley modeled by russel

textured using  different blin shaders

Billboard modeled by Gary

for the billboard i had to create a flyer advertizing a hot dog brand call Moom Dog with the character in an hot dog soot and a retro look with some relation to cartoons
 and texture the billboard

flyer
references images:

flyer created in Photoshop

Flyer converted to grayscale to see how it look

Billboard texture


wood texture

the rest of the texturing was done using maya shaders

Billboard textured and mapped

tin can
i modeled a can and added the flyer image to it

animation


i was given 2 shots to animate
shot 01


i had to animate moom riding his trolley i decided to use a curve to define the course and parented moom and his trolley to it

Screen Shots

then i added some secondairy animation to moom head an torso

video test

lighting

for the lighting i used a spot light a direction light and an image base lighting i took different snapshot that i converted to grayscale while adjusting the lighting to get the best look

 first render with no lighting

lighting added

reduced the amount of specularity on Moom shader

rendering

the rendering was done in layers on for the color information on for the shadows
for the shadows a ground plane was created in maya to reflect the shadow on before rendering

the same principle were applied for the second shot

 compositing

all the compositing work was made on after effect
after importing the different layers rendered as image sequences i first created an adjustment layer and applied an hue/saturation effect to change the footage to black and white then i added a blur effect to the shadow layers and a motion blur to the colour layer

i wanted to add some spark to the trolley when it is turning around the corner
i found a footage of spark that all ready had transparency after scaling it to size i key framed the spark to animate it

unfortunately it only show when in colour and is barely visible in black and white


the final look of the shot was looking very similar in terms of shades of Gray so i decided to lay with a filter to enhance the look of it the filter witch is an adjustment layer with different effect was made using a basic filter template witch effect were adjusted to help make the shot more interesting to look at

before

after

the only missing thing was the the noise and slitty damaged look that hold movie has
i tried to replicate the effect and then found an hold footage of 8mm film that i added as a layer set at a multiply mode