Week 3 and week 10 are on Thursdays in the green screen room

Favorite movie title sequence?

Superbad (2007) title sequence (youtube.com)

The first movie that comes to me right now is the Super bad title sequence. Similar to the James Bond title sequence similar effects are used. Effects such as the background of someone dancing in a ray of bright colours. Despite the movie being made in 2007 it has an old film look. With the lines going down the picture for a few frames. I just like the look of the film intro. It’s a cool somewhat funny sequence. Sets up the story for the audience. Showing two friends who are the main characters in the film.

X-Men (2000) – Opening Titles 1080p HD (youtube.com)

TINTIN MOVIE OPENING.avi (youtube.com)

I enjoyed the lesson covering after effects. I’ve used it before but there were a few things such as layering sequences over that I didn’t know you could do. I like the Dr No intro and it was a great refresh session for me to get back in to after effects.

Do the Doctor NO intro

This clip below was something I did at home. I wanted to restart so I could recap everything again from the lesson. I thought this would be better for me to go over on the lesson again.

Week 2 – live and let die SKULL intro

https://youtu.be/sKDu0UEdmpw

Above is a video of me practising with the background smoke and removing the red heart colour of the cards. This was our introduction to alphas and transparency.

For this week we worked on the James bond skull intro from live and let die. Creating an effect where a skull is showing Daniel craigs face through flames. For this effects to work I had to cut out the skull using the pen tool and duplicate the skull and James bond images. Then I cut out Daniel craigs eyes and nose while also lowering the opacity for it to come through. The part where I removed the eyes and nose is also known as masking. Taking out parts of the image.

I’ve managed to complete the lessons task outside of the lesson because I fell behind a bit. I really enjoyed the class task and it was refreshing to use some of the After effects features that I haven’t used in a while such as the colour correction curves tool. Where I changed the colour of the fire. Learning about alphas and transparency will definitely come in handy for the assignments.

Week 3 22/2/24 Green screen room

For our third lesson we went in on a Thursday to use the green screen room creating a lot of cool videos to replicate the James Bond intro silhouettes. The cameras were fun to use. Quite complicated, I didn’t get how to use the cameras other than tilting them and understanding the effects of green screen.
During the recordings I learnt that the colour yellow can act up on the green screen. Yellow and blue make green so I can get an idea of why there was some interference. The group only had this issue when filming with brief cases as they had yellow tape on them. Another thing I learnt using the green screen was when someone dropped a nail on the floor on the green screen. After coming back from break a little early I could see the nail because it was interfering with the green screen. The monitor showed some fuzziness around the are where the nail was. Despite it being tiny it was cool to see the effects and the monitor picking up this minor issue.

We did some cool poses for our next lesson to edit. I will add in the silhouettes in Adobe After effects on Tuesday’s lesson. Adding cool effects such as the circles I used in the first lesson.

Week 4

Week 5

This weeks lesson the class and I leant how to track videos in After effects. Allowing us to key an object to something in the video. The tracker will naturally follow whatever we set it to target. This saves a lot of time allowing us to avoid manually setting an image to something frame by frame.

First Tracker

The first tracker tutorial we did was easy. To start this off I set the anchor point to a suitable place for the tracker to go. Then we went in to window, tracker and then click track motion. From here all I had to do was set the subject using the aimer in the middle. If the thing it’s tracking is noticeable for the computer to track then the track will go well. Finally I set the sign for mountains to be tracking the mountains I set in the video.

Second tracker

This effects worked really well with the tracker. The boys face in the video was tracked pretty well by After effects. The only issue I found in this particular video was when the boy’s arm crosses his face. The tracker does get a little shaky, however it’s still able to track the kid’s face. Adding the blur effect is a perfect tool to go with this tracking example. I can see this being very useful for documentaries or just filming in public. Or if someone wanted to hide a logo for copyright reasons.

Third tracker

I’ve tried to use this effect in the past but I had some problems with it. On my Mac this effect wouldn’t track my footage and it would just crash. This was when I tried to create a Stranger things look for my College project last year.

Using the effect I originally wanted to add vines on to this video. I ended up leaving this part out because the effect wasn’t creating a 3D space and kept coming up with errors.

Fourth tracker

This tracking effect would remove parts from a video and replace them with ai generated replacement images. I thought this effect was alright. There was some stuff in the video that I tried removing such as the mountain and the bell on the bridge. I say I tried because the bell and mountain was very blurry and awkward. It ruined the video a bit. I think this is great for small background stuff.

I found these tutorials to be quite easy and fun. A lot of the effects had the computer generating and reading the videos by itself. Creating a slightly 3D environment or tracking objects in the video. I really enjoyed this lesson.

Week 6

Week 7

Week 7 was about changing post production. Changing images taken from Maya and adding some exposure to it in After effects.

Showreel 22/03/24

Fixed version below

Week 8

In week 8 we used Bullet. A Maya extension that allows for objects to be simulated. Bullet adds physics in to the project and is great for creating simple scenes.

So on Tuesday’s lesson we were taught how to use an application in Maya called bullet. We had to go in window settings and preferences to add it in to the project. Bullet is essentially a simulation. It takes in objects and gives them a mass and gravity which all can be modified in Maya. The it simulates the physics in the project. It’s pretty cool to use, especially since I’ve spent so much time modelling in Maya without knowing how to make things move.

I made a dominoes sequence when playing around with the mass settings. You can see the use of bullet here with the gravity and interaction between the dominoes.

Week 9

In week 9 we used nCloth. Similar to bullet, nCloth simulates physics of objects in Maya. Adding in gravity, wind and applying material physics to shapes in Maya.

Second video was me making a trampoline and applying a particle emitter to bounce off of the built trampoline. Adding mass  to the particles and increasing the balls bouncing on the trampoline. This was a cool exercise to use, I found it was a great way of being introduced in to Maya’s simulation software. You can see me changing the material interaction to chain mail in the video. The interaction between the particles and the trampoline becomes a lot more subtle.

Week 10

Green screen plan

So for my next project I have to create a Bond sequence. I will be going in on Thursday to record some videos for myself to work on. This will be used for the Bond intro sequence. My plan was to have a video of me firing a gun and a bullet coming out of it. I’ll create the bullet on After effects, but I want the camera to zoom in on the bullet and for it to create a red trail. So I fire the gun and then the camera zooms in on the bullet and maybe some credits come up.

Props: Planning on brining glasses. I don’t think it will do too much but I think it could be cool if I turn to the sides at any point.

Week 11

Week 11 we got to use a maya tool called fluids which simulate smoke and other cool gas looking particles. As you can see I had some fun with it in the lesson as well as at home.

Assets in  final video:

My Maya James Bond sequence:

Final James Bond sequence: