Meteor VFX shot

For another of my VFX shots I decided to create a meteor effect. I did this by 3D tracking a shot of a building and sky in after effects them compositing in particle effects, light effects and colour grading. Using 3D tracker, motion tracker and null objects. The effects themselves took alot of tweaking untill they created an effective meteor effect. Here is the final result.

 

This is the Final shot for my decaying house project.

One of my university assignments this year was to create several visual effects shots. One of the requirements was a live action back plate. I decided to composite decay, grime and a sky replacment onto live action footage of a simple house, turning it from a normal building into a decaying structure also adding colour correction to create atmosphere. I did this prodominately in After Effects using Mocha to track the building to composite the decay and grime in and Photoshop to paint it in. Overall I was really happy with the result although some of the tracking could do with a bit of tweaking and the roto of the building wasnt as precise as I wouldve wanted.

As well as working for the Headless team I did a small amount of work for other productions. One of these was Claws for Concern. They needed a 3D interior of a factory built for reference for 2D backgrounds. They were going to use these to create accurate 2D background with.

Throughout the production of the Headless short film I also learnt to create UV textures in Maya by unwrapping them in the UV texture editor. This can be a long process as some of the buildings we were unwrapping had high polygon areas like window frames, guttering and arials. I learnt to unwrap effeciently and lay out understandable UV's and later created textures from these to use on other buildings within the project.

For the Headless short film I did some texturing for a building. The look of the animation is quite quirky and cartoony and I tried to capture this ethos within the textures.

 

Once the animation was complete we brought the Tiff files into after effects and composited them into the footage. This required masking out a lot of the objects including the car, tree and stop motion doorway as well as adjusting the charcters onto the back plate footage. Once this was complete we adjusted the colour and added a small amount of motion blur. The end result was was successful

 

Once the filming was done I sorted through all the footage and found the best take. It was then down to me and my fellow VFX artist Calum Meyer to edit the footage to the specifications of the script. Cutting in areas and adding in others to create footage sealess to the script. On top of this we also added a degree of colour correction and warp stabalisation to limit the camera shake and really bring the footage to life.

Throughout this process we encountered many problems that needed solving. The team wanted more floor space to animate on for the bench shot. As the footage we were using was filmed to high it required making a set extension. To do this we copied the frame to photoshop and painted on a wide floor extention using the brush, fill and patch tools. It took alot of tweaking to get it right but finally we were able to composite it behind the footage in after effects while key framing the footage to move gradually up then back down to accomadate the extension. Again this took time to adjust to the right settings.

In the end we were able to create succesful footage which was asthetically very strong and meeted the script reuirements. This was then given to the animators. Here are some frames from that stage of the pipeline.      

The animation we were making required the creation of a large model town on which the characters would later perform. Although the vast majority of this was made by the director Martin Burn I pitched in to create the odd tree or chair. After the set was finished it was the job of filming the back plate which we ambitiously planned to shoot in one continuous take, dollying from one side to the other stopping on queues to allow time for the story to progress. This posed many challenges, one of which being the lighting. We set up three dedo lights, two illuminating the set from the front at different angles allowing us to cast shadows into specific areas while leaving others more brightly lit and another behind keeping the doors tight to allow only a small amount of light onto the building windows creating of the illusion of light on in the house.

The main problem we encountered while filming this back plate was keeping the continuous camera movement steady and in time with the script, stopping at certain times to allow scenes to playout. Although things such as camera wobble and small editing problems could be fixed in post-production we wanted to create a back plate that was as close to the script as possible. For this we created a system of markers on the floor writing times for stopping and panning allowing us to get the camera movement as accurate as possible. Although it wasn’t perfect and it took many takes we came out with some really successful footage.

Restorative justuce is an organisation that allows ofenders to meet the victims of their crimes, talk about the reprecussions and discuss the impact its had on their lives. It gives both parties an oportunity to voice issues they felt were unresolved by the justice system. They approached us and asked us to create short animations explaining the restorative justice process. I joined a team who were planning on creating a stop motion, 2D, live action animation. The plan was to create a cardboard backplate of a town and animate 2D characters ontop as they went through the restorative justice process in a simple way. My first task was to edit the storyboard, creating this animatic from stills and a soundtrack the group has previously recorded.   

The 11 second club is a monthly animation competition. Each month the website gives a new sound track or peice of dialouge out and animators submit a short charcater animation using this. For my animation I used a simple rotoscope method to create a 2D character talking directly to the camera. As the dialouge centered around descision making I added the cards and chips to add weight to this theme.