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.