Final Project week 4

The final week!
I'll be out of town Tuesday and Wednesday so I'm uploading and posting today.

The video is finished and I'm pretty happy with it. I spent longer than I had hoped on it, not because of setbacks, but rather I wasn't happy with what I made. I spent whole evenings working on the credit sequence (its only a couple seconds long) only to look at what I made and not like it. I must have gone through eight different ending sequences in After Effects before I settled on the one in the video. I started with one that was basic text, but I thought it was too boring and scrapped it. Tried doing a digital-ish background with text, and thought it looked too cheesy. Then I spent some time making my own background in Photoshop, which took me a few hours to tweak.



I imported the PSD into After Effects and worked in 3D to get the floating effect I wanted with the camera pan. I must have changed what I wanted the camera to do and which way I wanted things to move, etc, etc a gajillion times. It ended up being simple, yet elegant and that's what I was shooting for. I also tried a few intros in After Effects, but as I expected, I liked my original enough that I used it as my signature intro.



The editing also took a long time to assemble the footage and find the good shots. Once again it brought back a lot of memories of my drifting days. Most of those people are no longer driving and the cars have been sold/wrecked, and the same goes for myself. I enjoyed the project as a whole and the video, while being nothing spectacular, will be around for me to remember in the future. I look forward to working on my After Effects skills after I graduate in a few months, I tend to enjoy editing/creating more when I'm not worrying about making the grade. Great class!

Final Project Week 3

I'm a little late on this, but it doesn't mean I haven't made progress! End of semester classes have been kicking my butt so my blog posting got shoved to the side.

So anyway, progress is going well. The footage is assembled and the music chosen. Only thing that is really left is to finish up the AE text for the credits/end.

Here is a screenshot:

Final project week 2 report

Still getting everything together and figuring out what I want to use for the text portions, I really like using 3D with text. My only worry is that I run out of new ideas for the different styles. As I have said, I have a hard time coming up with unique creations in After Effects off the top of my head.

Final Project - Intro

For my final project I'm planning on integrating some of my extreme sport footage of drifting with two After Effects features: 3D and text manipulation. My original intent for taking this class was to learn how to use After Effects to make my videos better and that's what I plan on doing.

I have very little interest in creating feature/fiction film. My RTF career at UT has been in perusing editing and documentary. Honestly, I think I suck at creating stories from my head, I prefer to film the real world as it happens and use my creativity to assemble it into an entertaining video or documentary. It seems any time I try to create something from an idea, a video or action of some sort, it just comes out lame. So, that is why I've decided to use my strengths in After Effects to support something I know and enjoy doing.



For the actual project I am planning on using drift footage gathered over the years and including text intros and credits to 'spruce up' the documentary footage. Of course there will be setbacks and things that I will want to change, but my style is usually loosely planned or off the cuff, so I hardly ever can plan out what the final project will be when its finished. That's the beauty of my work so far :)



Basic schedule
Week 1 - organize
Week 2 - Go through my stockpiled footage for the good/interesting shots, edit
Week 3 - Music and edit, work on the intro AE sequence and any other text.
Week 4 - Tidy up the loose ends in the video edit and the AE titles, render

Particles

I choose to create a fire with particle on a photo of a squirrel smoking a cigarette. I have five particle effects using faded spheres and stars for the embers, the main fire effect, two flares of different other fire colors, slight smoke, and some faint embers set to twist.

Project #7 Motion Tracking

I thought motion tracking was going to be harder, but turned out (after 3 different tries) I found some footage that worked with a good motion track. I first had to experiment with different clips, I stopped using ones that had little contrast or were too jumpy. Once I put the bears in the clip I made each of them rotate for S&G's. Nothing too elaborate or fancy, but I laugh at it each time I see it since it doesn't make any sense!

Project #6 - Text

Fiddled around with some of the text similar to the presets and didn't like that style. Decided to employ some more 3D cameras and liked that much more. This video was the best of my attempts. Simple text with some embellishments.

Project # 5

After trying out various 3D intro-type sequences I was unsatisfied with the more complex ones.

I started this one with my business's logo design and text in Photoshop and experimented with different beginning camera and light angles. I finally settled on a lower left hand corner zoomed in view for the camera, moving toward the center and pulling out. The light was placed in the upper portion of the logo facing away, then animated to light the bottom up to the top and pulling outward at the same time while getting brighter. I made the text layer 3D by moving the Z axis away from the logo plane. As the camera pulls outwards the text is also resizing and moving back to fit within the white space.

Once that was finished to my liking I had some inspiration to create a little video to include my logo/text introduction. I edited some of my extreme sports footage I have shot over the years to Goose's Whipass Remix. I'm quite happy with the final product!



***Its widescreen so looks better if viewed on YouTube, not the blog***

Project # 5 progress

I've always been interested in intro sequences to videos and films. With learning more about 3D in After Effects I thought I would attempt to make my own intro using the 3D planes.

So far it is going ok, having some trouble getting things to go the right way, but overall its pretty fun and I think it will come out to my liking for a first try.

My inspiration comes from videos such as the MVP TX2K9 video intro:

Project # 4

In this week's project I decided to tackle masks, specifically a crossover of myself over myself in a video. I've always been fascinated with how it was done, but never took the time to find out how. After learning how the process was done in class I had to try it out.



First off, it was a lot harder than expected to make look right from the example shown in class. It took about as long as I thought it would, but the completed product was not what I had in mind. I think one of my problems in getting it matched and more real-looking was the lighting and camera choice. The light I shot the video in was lighter and my body cast shadows that I had to work around as well. I think in a darker environment I would have been able to get away with more.

About a quarter of the way through making my masks and essentially rotoscoping around my body I played it back and found I had made the mask too wide around my walking body, which made it look like I had a halo as I walked over my standing self. So I had to re-do everything I had already done. The rest went relatively as planned once I made the mask closer to my body, but as I started to tweak things after the main masks were set I got mixed results. I had to do some color correction to both video segments to make them blend better, but I was not able to make it perfect in places....lets just say it looks a lot better than it did before I played with the levels. I wanted to feather the mask's edges, but every time I did that it looked really funky when the two bodies went over each other. So I ended up sticking with very little feathering.

For the first attempt at masks I'm happy with it, definitely need more practice if I want to use this for practical uses to show to people, but hey, its a start.

Project # 3

Hooray for the 2D crankshaft engine! Yeah, I realized I wouldn't be able to have an actual '3D' rotating crankshaft so I made the best of it. This short clip is supposed to demonstrate what a boxer engine style would look like in motion without the top end valves and block to get in the way of viewing.



I cut apart the pistons, rods, and crankshaft in Photoshop, then imported them into an After Effects layout. The crank was not cropped correctly so I jumped back into Photoshop to correctly size the crank so that the rotation-like effect would look right and resize around the correct axis and updated the layer in AE.

Then I took each piston and made sure they were placed under their corresponding rod, then parented each one so they would move in unison. Once I did the transform on the crankshaft and moved the piston/rod assemblies to where they needed to go I precomposed the entire assembly into a nested composition.

Project # 2

I'm still stumbling with After Effects's controls and abilities. I'm not all that happy with the first project; for the amount of time it took me it feels like it should be something much better than it is. Learning process I suppose...



Edited the image of the car in Photoshop, imported the layers into AE and manipulated the wheel's rotation with blur, the body's slight rise and fall as well as the color hue, then moved them all offscreen. The audio was from a video I shot years ago I found in my event archives.

I wanted the car to turn around and go back across the screen the opposeite way in a smaller size, but I couldn't parent the wheels to the body since I did not want them to move up and down with the body and that created a lot of headache trying to align the layers in a smaller size and have them follow, etc. I'm sure I'm making it harder than it really is, but it was frustrating when the transforms did not work right.

Project # 1 - Hand

I used a photo of my hand in some greenery overlayed with a mask of a leaf with some color correction, contrast increase, and added some blur.

Intro

Welcome to my blog! A little about me...

I've been shooting photography and video since I was a teenager and have owned my extreme sports video/photography business RCTV Productions since before college. I love extreme sports and anything with high adrenaline fun, currently interested in drifting, race quads, dirt bikes, RC airplanes/helis, and kiteboarding. I work on and race my own cars and bikes, but being in college keeps me from racing as much as I'd like. Also have a business cutting and designing vinyl graphics for cars and storefront windows.







I like to experiment with small camera video. Got a GoPro Hero HD motorsports camera for Christmas and currently am developing an aerial mount for my RC helicopter. Also working with it on my MX helmet to get first hand views of riding my quad. Once the warmer seasons come around I'm planning on getting some cool footage of kiteboarding out on the water here in Austin.



Here is a video taken with the GoPro mounted on my helmet.


This is a short doc I did a few semesters ago about drifting

RTF Drift doc from chixwithtrix on Vimeo.

Other than that I enjoy spending time with my pets and boyfriend - Shyla the rescued border collie, Izzy the rescued bearded dragon, Kei the hedgehog, Piro the Betta fish, and my boyfriend of 6 years, Ian.





You can check out my other websites here
www.rc-tvproductions.com
www.sidewaysvinyl.com
www.chixwithtrix.wordpress.com