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.
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