The Summer Time Animation Domination

It's summer time in Seattle and I have a great new idea: I'm going to spend it in doors creating animations. Just kidding... well, partially kidding. The past two weekends I created new animations and I already have another idea for a third which I will work on THIS weekend. So unless something irresistible comes up, I'll just keep making them on a weekly basis. Today I'll show you two that I have done so far, and go into the details of the second one. (I make another blog to talk about the first animation, but since I just completed the second animation I'm more excited to talk about that.)
 

Ok!! So I was sitting there one day thinking about my portfolio and that I really needed several animations made purely in After Effects. So I was brainstorming about a good animation that uses a lot of layers and has a bunch of moving parts when I had the idea to create an animation to simulate the inside of a clock. Now when you watch it obviously isn't designed from the blueprints of an actual clock, but it does have several key elements: A) an enclosed environment, B) moving gears, and C) the shadow of a clock face. 

A) This effect was created by importing a wood texture that I found online. I tried to find the most evenly lighted picture so that all the edges were the same brightness and there wasn't a repeating hot spot on each wall. After I imported the picture I turned it into a 3D layer, changed the rotation to create the floor, duplicated it, changed the rotation again to turn it into a wall, and repeated the process till I had my little wooden room. Doing this created a feeling of being in a space (or hopefully being in a clock).

B) The moving gears were also found online in one illustrator file that someone put up for others to use. I went through and picked the gears I liked, then precomposed them. I brought them all in individually and placed them within the clock compositon. For the rotation animation I Alt+Clicked on the Z rotation and added the expression "time*X." Then I would duplicate the gears line up the teeth and change duplicate's expression to "time*-X" so that they would rotate in the opposite direction.

C) The Shadow of the clock face was pretty straight forward. I imported a png file of the clock face (thus preserving it's transparency) and put it into my comp. Then I turned it into a 3D layer and placed it behind the camera. Then I created a spotlight and placed it behind the clock face and pointed it at the rear wall. Then I opened the clock face's Transform Properties and enabled "Cast Shadows." Viola! Instant shadow!

After I created the animation, I found some simple sound effects on Youtube and laid them on the track in Final Cut Pro. Finally I put the animation on repeat.  And that's that! I will admit that I am not 100% happy with the lighting in the scene, but it lighting is not an area that I have worked a lot in yet, so maybe that will be my next project!.

Captain America Teaser Trailer

My favorite character in the Marvel Universe has to be Captain America. He may not have the strongest super-powers, but he makes up for it with his stoicism, tactical insight, and golden moral compass. And earlier this week, I made a video homage to Cap that can be found right below. Underneath that I break down how I made the video.

The first step in making this video was shot planning. I broke down everything I needed into eight unique shots: two close up pans of Cap in ice, a long "reveal" shot of cap in ice, one close up of his hand moving, a shot of Cap spinning/throwing shield, one of him riding his motorcycle, Cap running, and finally the "movie poster" shot for the title at the end. Each one of these shots were taken with my Nikon D5100, processed through After Effects (except for the two close up pans which were never processed), and finally exported and edited in Final Cut Pro.

Before I started filming, I really wanted to make sure that my animations looked smooth. So I took my camera and did some test footage of me spinning around in circles and also rotatin
g my hand. Then I counted how many frames it took me to spin around in a complete circle so I knew I how many I had to do to recreate it. Then once I had all of my footage, I had to compile the individual photos into a .mov file. I have found the easiest way to do this is to import and layout all the photos in iMovie, then re-time that file in either AE or FCP.

I did a lion share of the work for this video in After Effects. All of the stop animation (and the motorcycle) shots were filmed in front a green screen, which I then replaced with a vignetted background that I made in Photoshop. The hand moving shot also presented a problem because the subject moved a lot during the filming, so the image jumped all over the frame. I used the image stabilizing function in AE which really helped keep the image still. For the motorcycle shot, I made the front wheel blur and put some lens flares on the headlights. Also, if you watch the running shot closely you can see that the head of Cap is actually pasted on top of a headless body! The final step in AE was to add some vignettes on the reveal shot as well as the hand moving shot to keep the dark aesthetic consistent.

In Final Cut, I imported all of my files and laid out a rough cut of the sequence. This involved re-timing some of the footage, trying out different music, and doing all of my voice overs. Once I had good feel for how long each shot should be I cut and mixed the final music and adjusted the timing of the VOs. My voice recordings are always very soft, so I have had a tough time trying to mix music without dropping the overall volume of the piece. BUT figuring out the best solution to that problem is just part of the fun. I'm constantly messing with settings, Googling something, and learning new tricks.

Cosplay Spotlight: Beast!

Hey all! It has been quite a while since I posted, but it is time to reveal what I have been working on for so long! Here is a video spotlight and breakdown of the Cosplay my friend Lauren McLaren and I made for Emerald City Comicon.

After 5 months of work, we made this Uncanny costume of everybody's favorite blue-haired X-Men, Beast! We debuted it at Emerald City Comicon, which was WAY bigger than last year's event. I would guess somewhere around twice the amount of people, which really blew me away. Better yet out of all the contestants for this year's costume contest, I got 3rd place in the Marvel category! What made it better is that Yaya Han (a famous professional cosplayer) was one of the judges!

It was a very successful event and I wanted to create a video to break down the individual pieces that make up this costume. The video is made up of three different elements: live action footage of the costume shot against a green screen, piece-by-piece break down snippets, and a motion background with particle effects.

Re-shot Footage

Original Footage

The live action footage of the costume was originally shot horizontal, but the footage ended up being too dark and it pixelated horribly whenever I zoomed in. So I reshot the video, moving the camera closer and turning it vertical so that the subject took up much more space in the frame. It turned out much better and allowed me to zoom in with pretty good results. As I previously stated, the original footage was also too dark which gave me a lot of problems whenever I tried to key out all of the green. The reshot video had much better lighting and didn't give any trouble in the keying process. Lighting is very tricky with green screens.

The snippets (and the live action footage) were shot using a Nikon D5100 against a nice dark red curtain and my friend Lauren McLaren played the role of Vanna White.

A majority of the project was done in Adobe After Effects, which I am currently learning how to use (though there is so much to the program, I will probably never stop learning new aspects of it). I created the yellow and blue X background out of several layers with a mask on the yellow layer to cut away chunks and give it the X shape. Then I used two particle generators and stretched them from corner to corner to get the little yellow streaks to fly by each other. After I did all that, it was a little too bright so slapped a transparent grey layer over the top of them to dull all the colors. This helped the costume pop from the background.

Once I had all of the footage, I keyed out all of the green from the live action video, turned it vertical, then scaled down the image. I also created a virtual camera within the project so that I could zoom around the live action footage. After I figured out where I wanted to zoom in I brought in the scaled-down snippets and positioned them relative to their respective pieces. Then I made all of the different media layers into 3D layers so that I could move some forward and retreat others to give the video a feeling of depth. When all of that was done, I imported the finished After Effects footage into Final Cut Pro, where I mixed all the audio and added a fade-to-black.

This was a really fun video to make and I hope you all enjoy it! I have plans to make more videos like this one in the future to spotlight all the other fun costumes that Lauren and I have created.

DIY Resin Mold Skulls

This weekend Lauren and I did our first experiment with polyester resin casting. She is making skulls for a Mystique costume belt and I made a video to share the experience with other costumers who are interested in using casting resin to make their costumes.

We bought a 32 oz container of casting resin and a small container of catalyst from the craft store and used a cookie mold to get it into the skull shape. Each skull uses approximately one ounce of resin and takes about 24 hours to cure. They are easy to make, they are lightweight and durable, and they look great.

Check out the video for the details!

Spooky Stop Motion

Happy Halloween! This was my first time doing an animation outside with lighting that changed as I went. There are some things I would do differently but I'm not unhappy with the results. More details on how I did it are below:

I shot with this with my new Nikon D5100 that I got about month ago. We were camping on the Oregon coast and I figured this would make for a great project to do while the sun went down. The shoot took roughly an hour and is composed of around 250 separate photos. Because the sun was going down, we (my girlfriend Lauren and I) couldn't go back and reshoot anything. So there are lots of things I would like to do differently if I were to do it again. As far as post production, this is the first time that I actually took stills instead of just going through and pulling freeze frames from footage. I finally figured out that by importing everything into iPhoto I could easily set all the pictures in order and touch them up as needed. After that I loaded the photos into iMovie and laid them all out in the timeline at a 10th a second a piece and saved the movie as a QT file. THEN I loaded that QT file into Avid where I did my precision editing and added music. The music is from the Sorcerer and the Apprentice. Enjoy!

Suggested Viewings: British Cinema

All of you aspiring film aficionados have probably thought to yourself, "I want to expand my understanding of the cinematic medium by watching foreign films." Shortly after you doubtlessly remembered that the reason you don't is because you don't like reading subtitles. Many people have told me that the reason that they don't like to watch foreign movies is because they don't want to read subtitles. Personally, they don't bother me in the slightest, but I can see where people are coming from. So, in light of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee I have pulled two British action movies for your viewing pleasure. This way you can explore foreign cinema without the alienating foreign language! It's a nice way to ease yourself into exploring films from beyond our borders.
The following movies are also tied together with two common themes: They are all directed by Guy Ritchie and star Jason Statham. So you know they're going to be awesome.

 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
When a group of no-bodies get cheated in a high-stakes card game they end up half a million pounds (that's British money) in debt with only a week to pay it back. Guy Ritchie movies always have a lot of great action and comedy. They characters, situations, and dialogue will get at least a few chuckles out of you. Lots of gangsters, guns, and f-bombs in this little gem.

Snatch (2000)

Jason Statham, yet again, finds himself being chased by gangsters in one of my favorite action movies. Brad Pitt plays a bare-knuckle boxing gypsy that gets two boxing promoters in trouble with the bookmakers. This one has a great cast and a truly chaotic (yet manageable) story line. If you're looking for witty comedy, bad-ass dialogue, and pig farmers, this is the one for you.

Guy Ritchie has also made another movie that is similar to the above called Revolver which was released in 2005 in the UK and 2007 in the US. I personally do not believe it is quite good enough to suggest everyone to go watch it, but if you really liked the first two you'll probably like this one as well.

Discussions with Devs: Beatrice the Biologist on Amoeboid

In this episode I sit down with the voice of Katie McKissick, also known as Beatrice the Biologist, to talk about her new game Amoeboid. It's a kind of like Pac-Man on the cellular level.

Check out her blog here, http://www.beatricebiologist.com/.