Everything here is from what I've done in 2012. I've also included a VFX breakdown recalling (to the best of my ability) how I did each effect.
All of this is from what I've learned independently. Please enjoy. :)
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This is a shot from Gorklenfisrentron, a science fiction short directed by Thomas Ward. For this project, I did all of the visual effects. Here the robot is about to annihilate a crowd of people with its laser vision. To accomplish this I built a bright green membrane-like nucleus and tracked it to his eyes. The robot was shaking violently, so the two eye tracks were a bit difficult (filmed in 24p 1/48 framerate - a decent amount of motion blur to deal with) To really sell the effect that this robot was going into its overdrive I played with some particle emitters, creating green spark explosions erupting from the seams in the metal. I staggered their eruptions and tried to make it look as haphazard as possible. Lastly, to build up the glow I duplicated the nuclei, added a gaussian blur, and applied an add. |
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This is another shot from Gorklenfisrentron. This was a shaky hand-held shot with the camera moving through and behind the crowd. Throughout the shot, the robot's eyes were completely masked by people in the crowd several times. This shot was also filmed in 24p and with a 1/48 framerate. This made it nearly impossible to track, not to mention the numerous times the eyes were masked by the foreground. To work with this I started with roughly tracking a null object to one eye. Starting from the middle of each gap where the eyes were seen, I worked frame-by-frame forwards (exacting the null's coordinates manually every time), and then the same process backwards. Once the null object was thoroughly attached I parented the two eye nuclei to it, and shifted one over so by a uniform amount it aligned with the other eye. Then I did the same process as the previous shot to make it really illuminate: duplication, gaussian blurring, and adding. The last touch was to attach lens flares to the eyes - I parented these to the already-in-place nuclei. I made the point which the flare circles pivot on in the dead center of the frame (looked quite nice, because the eyes ended up all over the frame) and tinted them to the same green as the eyes, and the look was complete. |
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Another shot from Gorklenfisrentron. The scientist here shoots a ray-gun at intruders in his lab. For this shot, I figured I would show you my After Effects timeline as well. Preceding the full laser, the three rings on the gun had to light up one-by-one. It was a simple matter to make them glow, but they were impossible to track (he starts facing the desk, and then spins into position; the area where the rings are were quite uniformly dark and difficult to find contrast in). To get around this I had to (once again) manually process each frame, but this time while rotoscoping each ring. After that, the ball on the end of the gun was a similar process to the robot's eyes, and the laser was a solid matte with a distorted nucleus underneath. The lens flare's pivot point was actually cheated a lot closer to the lower right - it helped to sell the effect more convincingly. |
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Here are the two energy orbs (or 'nuclei' as I've come to dub them) that I've used in the effects displayed in this series of pictures. (Despite them being shown here as static images, they are very much alive and three-dimensional in video!) The left one was created in After Effects through a particle emitter, multiple line mattes, and a circle matte. The particle emitter was set that the particles would de-accelerate and fade as they were launched away from the core. The line mattes were five lines that were distorted and rippled so they would drift out of the central point; once they were looking effectively 'flowy,' they were converted to 3-D objects and duplicated multiple times, each one being rotated to a unique angle in three-dimensional space. Then I applied a 35mm camera to them and set it on a very shallow depth of field - this made some tendrils maintain sharpness while most were softly defocused. Lastly the core was (like most things I do) gaussianed, added, and duplicated upon itself, the duplicated version being further gaussian blurred. The right one was surprisingly created in Final Cut Pro through the video generators that are provided by default. It was a combination of three meticulously set layers - a membrane (the core), a 'spikey' swirly (the light rays), and a 'spiderweb spin' swirly (the dense rings). The membrane had its four start and four end points relatively close together and was set to a modest speed - this made a slowly rotating sphere that would work as the core. The 'spikey' swirly was set at a very high speed with more volatile settings and filters to make it rampant and unpredictable. The 'spiderweb spin' swirly was simply used to add more complexity underneath the whole effect. |
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This is a shot from Skyrim: The Arrival, an Elder Scrolls fan-fiction video directed by Nathan Kwon. For the this actor has to appear in a flash of soft light and speak to our hero as an apparition, with the Skyrim interface on top of him. Since he needs to appear out of thin air and disappear back into nothingness, the actor was keyed into the scene. The green screen we were using was very small, so it took a very tight (and keyframed with his movement) matte around his body. The upper left side of his hood crossed off of the screen, so it had to be manually matted. For the text, I did my best to emulate the dialogue interface from the game itself. I recreated the elements of the user interface and tweaked the settings of the text in order to make it almost identical to the font used in Skyrim. For moments where there are multiple dialogue options, they were keyframed to scroll through as if the player was choosing what to say as well. |
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This is another shot from Skyrim: The Arrival. This is after our protagonist has just gotten out of battle, and in a first person point-of-view uses Restoration magic to heal himself. The shining light erupting from his palm is very animated in live video. After building the nucleus, I tracked it to his hand and keyframed its various scale parameters (it was built from three main layers nested in the master sequence). Much like a muzzle flare, I matted out the section of his hand that would be affected by the light shining from the spell and increased its white and mid levels. This really sold the effect, making the bright part of the glove seem like it was shining. The last elements were the health and magicka bars on the lower part of the screen. Since they are a tad translucent I couldn't extract them from gameplay stills; I ended up building them myself in Photoshop. As the spell begins, the magicka bar fades in and begins to deplete. Simultaneously, the health bar is keyframed to increase. |
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This is the final timeline for Skyrim: The Arrival. For this project, I was all editing roles. The final product here is the most complicated project I have ever worked on. At its peak there were 28 video channels, and every single clip above the video channel 1 has been intricately keyframed. |
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This is my recreation of Skyrim's inventory interface in Skyrim: The Arrival. This is the infamous 28-channeled section of the video. We needed to have the inventory pop up in the exact fashion it does in the game. Everything from the amount of frames it takes to scroll between opinions has been to how quickly the picture and stats appear has been recreated. The template stays still for the most part, but everything on top of it shifts at once. Exacting the simultaneous motion of so many individual pieces took a long time. Much like the health and magicka bars before, mostly everything here is a degree translucent. Because of this, I ended up building every element of the user interface in Photoshop again. |
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This is the title slate for Skyrim: The Arrival. Although it doesn't have anything incredible, I figured it would be a nice thing to add in here since I had to build it from the ground up. The fonts are all unique - everything here is the same source font, but I tweaked them all differently and extensively in Photoshop to achieve a sharper, more cinematic look. I made the detailing around 'the arrival' as well, and duplicated and filtered all elements to make the light shine through them. The font all also slowly grows larger as if it's drifting towards the screen. The last element is the accent of fog, which is simply iconic from Skyrim's loading screens. With this a broke the usual Skyrim format a bit - instead of putting it behind the text, I placed it on the highest layer, raised the whites, dropped its opacity, and put on a screen filter to nilch the blacks. In the end it looked a bit better slightly overlapping the text elements than it completely in the background. |
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This is another interesting still. This frame isn't from a film; this is from a sample of typography I used to apply for a job. An employer recently asked me to make typography for him, and he gave me a short amount of time to muster a sample piece. When I went into the school's Motion Picture Arts lab to work on it, I realized that the computers weren't equipped with After Effects. I had based my research and plan around using After Effects, and I didn't have time that day to go home and do it, so I decided to make the typography about the fact that I had to do it in Final Cut Pro. |
