Project 2: Final Video, Reflection and Problems Faced

Here is the final video of my group's video:

Making this is far more challenging than Project 1 as the inclusion of a team would require cooperation and timing when compiling our work together. I practically reused whatever I learned from Project 1 and apply it to Project 2, allowing me to make major changes to the effects that I reused like Disintegration and Weather Change. Aside from that, I experienced what it was like making a full-length video in a team and that made me learn the importance of coordination.

The first problem I encountered was finding a proper location for our film. Due to the comedic and religious feel behind the story, we wished to, for the sake of irony, film in a forested area as most religious folks often separates nature from supernatural religion. We planned for Botanic Gardens and upon reaching earlier than planned, we decided to find a place to eat. When attempting to return, we got lost and decided to change to Bukit Timah, which was closer. It was kind of a blessing as Bukit Timah's forested region and quiet surroundings makes it perfect for our scene.

The second problem is our lack of green screen, which forces us to improvise. In scenes that normally requires green screen, we would either film the background or screenshot the background while editing. This presents two other problems: No camera shake (which makes it appear fake) and no coordination with the upper layer's camera movement, which thus requires motion tracking. This is especially prevalent with the hole at the 3D Shooting scene where the hole did not coordinate perfectly with the camera shake. Motion tracking was heavily used for that scene.

The final problem comes from our lack of acting skills. Our voices are sometimes too soft to be heard, forcing us to voice act at some parts. Last minutes changes to our scenes force changes in the script and thus, forgetting our lines became rather common. And finally, at the 3D Shooting scene, Leow was not supposed to drop to the floor but nonetheless, he decided to do so. Because of this, I had to mask him out, which was extremely tedious and very difficult. The results were not even perfect and attempts to correct the scene, such as filming again, were not foolproof. Hence, it was left as it is.

That concludes all the problems I faced.

For those interested, here are the bloopers:

Project 2: Storyboard

This is the storyboard for my sequence. It resembles the final video but changes were made, especially on the last effect, as it became difficult to make some of the intended effects:

Project 1 Final

This is the final render of my Project 1 video. It more or less resemble what I intended with the storyboard so I am happy and especially proud of my work. A few errors are still present and were not fixed due to lack of time or difficulty. Regardless, the video is mostly a success to me:

Project 1 Production Phase 3: Second Complex Effect

After dealing with the disintegration effect, I moved on to my next one: Weather Change effect, also based on a tutorial on VideoCopilot. The effect works in conjunction with the disintegration, in that the background will feature the weather change. The tutorial included a lightning strike upon a person but I did not include that, amongst other things. I also did a sky replacement. Here's the result:

The earlier parts of the vid was completely ignored despite the very obvious errors because those parts were either going to be trimmed or overlapped by the disintegrating screen on top of it. There are other errors present, such as the lightning bolt area being on top of the rain. Those will be remedied before the final rendering.

Also, note that the meteors from the storyboard was left out, along with the sword-summoning scene which is replaced with merely a red lightning bolt display. These are some changes made due to problems encountered.

Project 1 Production Phase 2: First Complex Effect

While I was filming, I took a lot of footage, most of which are similar except that it is taken from different perspectives or camera angles. One thing I learned from my past video-making experience is that it is safer to record more than you need in case the original plan did not go as planned. Here is an example. This footage was not used in the final render:

Fortunately, even though I took a lot more footage than needed, all the necessary ones were taken perfectly without any flaws so the extras were not actually needed.

After getting all the needed footage, I decided to go straight for the complex effects before compiling everything together and adding in other needed effects. My first one is a disintegrating effect, which causes the screen to slowly burn away from the top-left corner to the bottom-right. The effect is based on the disintegration tutorial from VideoCopilot. After going through the tutorial, I made some personal customizations and this is the final result, albeit without a background.

Please excuse the earlier parts of the video, which is nothing but a black void, as the blank portions were reserved for other footage.

Project 1 Production Phase 1: Storyboard

This is the storyboard I drew before I began filming. The words written are summarized and very brief. The final filming and special effects may differ, hence the storyboard is not final and is subject to change:

Because I am acting as a character, the storyboard refers to the actor (myself) by the character's name (Dark Viper). An intro and ending sequence will be included and will not be removed in any way.

Week 3 Lab 3

This is the result of me doing the Bleach Bypass tutorial. I recycled the Pope video:

 

This was a rather quick tutorial and I learned quite a bit from it. I can see how it makes the video better, although it ultimately depends on the scene.

These are the renders for part 2. This exercise was quite challenging so I had difficulties with the work:

For the first video, I redid about 3 times. I started by reducing the red tint and adding in a slight blue tint. I then reduced the saturation, mostly red, for the other colors. After that, the video will look similar as intended, albeit being very dark. That was where I faced a bit of difficulty. I ended up modifying the contrast/brightness and touched a bit on the gamma/exposure. Ultimately, I'm proud of my final render.

I did mostly the same for the second video, except that I changed the tint first. On a humorous note, I initially thought that it was an image rather than an actual video. Hence, I modified the video based on the first frame and ended up exaggerating it badly when I noticed how the background mountains and the foreground are always dark unlike the reference image. When I realized it was a video, I readjusted the contrast, brightness and color tone and got my final render. It is not exactly like the reference image but close enough and I'm fine with it.

Week 3 Lab 2

This is the final render of the two videos after I made the red less obvious:

I made use of all the methods covered in the Part 1 tutorial videos, including the plug-in tools. Making this was surprisingly easy and the masking that followed was a technique which I never actually thought of. Dealing with highly saturated colors should be easier for me from now onwards.

The only difficulty I faced was making only the Pope's robe in the second video less obvious. Unlike the first one, the second video features a lot of red color so masking was near necessity. However, the rope that is attached to his hat is also red and is on the robe in the scene. It shakes far too much to make a proper masking and the similarity in color make the rotto brush tool hard to use. So, I had to reduce the rope's saturation along with the robe.

Week 3 Lab 1

This is what I did for the Lab 1 exercise:

I had prior experience dealing with changing color tints and tones so I was very familiar with this exercise, especially after going through all the tutorial videos for Part 1. The only difficulty I had was ensuring that I did not exaggerate the color tones and to ensure that the characters' skins still looks realistic and believable.

For the first video, even though the exercise asked for an orange tone, I decided to make it pale brown instead, as I personally believe that pale brown fits the atmosphere and the setting. The scene's thick mist also makes pale brown more appropriate.

Week 2 Lab 2 and 3

This is what I did for the Track Matte tutorial:

This was surprisingly fast and simple to do, considering how this effect is actually widely used. In fact, I thought that perhaps I should use this kind of intro more often in future videos I would do. The video I decided to pick was the one made with the Set Extension tutorial. For the sake of humor, I made the title point out the video's flaw, most notably its obviously fake house and sky (since it jitters).

In addition, this is what I did for the James Bond Intro tutorial:

This one in particular is very tedious, not only because the tutorial is long but also because it uses a few advanced techniques which I was unfamiliar with and find rather hard to remember. Regardless, it made it seem like the intros used in the movies are not as advanced as it may seem. Aside from that, I actually had fun making this one and it also makes me more confident, since I encountered virtually no problems throughout the tutorial.

I customized the project slightly to make my own version of the intro. Here is the render:

The customized version includes a change in the blood, from red to green, and a much large flash for the gunfire. In addition, the curves were made slightly different and made more brighter.

Week 2 Lab 1 E-learning

This is what I have done for the e-learning exercise:

Due to its similarity to the Week 1 Lab 3 final tutorial, this one was done rather quickly. I do have problems, however, with the first perspective tracking (in which the camera focus shifts from the unconscious man to the screen). Because the screen was initially obscured, it cannot do perspective tracking from the beginning and considering the fact that the screen appears slowly rather than abruptly (like its second appearance), using perspective tracking may cause unwanted shaking. Hence, I used what I learned from the Set Extensions tutorial.

I used a track motion to track the motion of the camera shifting, stopping it when the screen fully appears. After that, I do the perspective tracking and parent it to the motion tracking. Hence, the final results.

Since I finished the James Bond video first, I decided to use it, for the sake of dry humor.

Week 1 Lab 3

These are video renders of the tutorials for Lab 3, all of which involves motion tracking:

I did the first tutorial but never had the chance to render it.

The tutorial for the blood splat video can be considered the introduction, and perhaps a foreshadow, for motion tracking and these tutorials expanded on them. Honestly, I've always been curious as to how movies had objects which was animated so nicely and realistically with the movements of the camera. Now, I can see how and these tutorials gave me the chance to try it out. The first two tutorials that I did was rather straightforward and simple. I had no difficulty understanding what was going on and the tutor made a rather good job being thorough with his explanations. It was the third one in which I encountered quite a number of problems.

Right at the beginning, when selecting the two points for the initial motion tracking, the one set to track a trio of rocks had difficulty keeping track of the movements, unlike the tutorial. Constantly, the motion tracker just went erratic and began jumping around and even after making adjustments to the size of the detection box, it was still jittery. I eventually resorted to using a small rock which the tutor used initially before changing. It was still not perfect however but much better than the problem I encountered. Hence, I bore with it. The other point, on the other hand, was steady the whole time.

Eventually, when parenting the houses to the motion tracker, I was able to see that despite all I did to stabilize the motion tracking of the first point, it was still noticeably jittery. This can be seen in the video, where the house, the sky and the shadows shook up and down as the camera moves up. I couldn't fix the problem so, I left it as it is. I'll try to avoid such an error next time.

Other than that, the tutorial was very helpful and nonetheless, useful. It was somewhat fun making these videos and the adjustments layers were particularly familiar to me, once again due to experience with Photoshop.

As for the final part of the lab, I picked the Kick Ass video, mostly because I have seen the movie:

Making this was rather easy and quick, especially after my tutor showed us how to use perspective tracking for track motion.  Initially, I had difficulty hiding the TV footage for after and before the TV scene but I received help from my friends on that matter. As it turns out, the video can be trimmed by resizing the rectangle on the timeline representing the layer. Aside from that, I also had a few difficulties with the tracking as I want to make it appear as close to an actual television as possible. Whenever the screen appeared out of the TV border, I will often redo the tracking. Otherwise, this one was rather fun to do.

As a little joke, I used the same footage for the television screen, making it seem like the characters are watching themselves watching TV.

Week 1 Lab 2

This is my blood splat video which I have done for Lab 2:

This was slightly more difficult to do as masking a moving person is harder, and more tedious, than masking a static object (I have done masking in Adobe Photoshop). This is my first ever attempting in masking a moving person (and a fast one) and it actually wasn't perfect.

I decided to try and use the masking tool as the tutorial has shown rather than using the rotto brush tool that was recommended by my tutor. I thought that perhaps if I could try and practice using the more "primitive" tool, I may be able to master it eventually. This way, I won't have to rely so heavily on the rotto brush tool in the future. Although, while I am making progress, it is a rather slow one. Aside from that, other parts of the tutorial was rather straightforward and familiar in some cases, such as Matte Effects and Textures such as Color Burn, due to prior experience with Photoshop.

Overall, this tutorial was fun.

Week 1 Lab 1

I've never done custom special effects on videos before, which practically means that I never touched Adobe After Effects before. Hence, almost everything I learned on the first lab was new to me, although several terms, such as keyframes and animation, are familiar to me as we learned about such things in the past. The first two tutorials went smoothly and I must say that the tutorial was rather thorough. Almost no problems were encountered. I actually followed the tutorials to the letter, hence it looked virtually similar to the actual video. Here is what I have done so far:

Making these actually made me interested to learn more so I won't stop at these two tutorials. Should I find the time, I would go through the rest and possibly post them on this post. (In fact, I learned how to render by jumping to the final tutorial, which was about rendering.)