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.