Own findings.

I have this love for abandoned places, so whenever I see anything I make sure I photograph it. 

And it's paying off since I will be sort of using it as a reference now : D
I also have photos of trees and roots and all little streams just... all sorts that I think are relevant in one way or another.

So here's a few bits and pieces.

Digital Domain - Research

After tons and tons of vfx breakdowns I decided to just look at some companies that deal with this stuff. 

Digital Domain is one of them. They are a Visual Effects and Animation company, funded  in 1993 so they've been around for a while. They do all sorts, like special effects and animations etc for movies, advertisements game and music productions. 

They worked on things like: The Day After Tomorrow, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean At Worlds End, Thor, Iron Man 3, and many many more. I only mentioned the ones I love :') 

But my absolute favourite one is The Law Of The Jungle that they did, for Bungie!
Cause obviously, with me being a Bungie lover... This has to be my favourite.
I had a read about it and what I found is that Jay Barton and Richard Morton were supervising all of it.
Jay Barton worked on things like Tron and X-men, and many ad campaigns for example Audi and Volkswagen.
Richard Morton also worked in both ad's and film, involved in things like Speed Racer, Ender's Game, Tron, music videos like Linkin park's Castle of Glass etc etc. The list is very long for both of the artists :')
For the Law of The Jungle they used reference material from Bungie's game engine along with CG game assets. They re-rendered the whole material in really high resolution and re-designed bits and pieces.
They used motion capture, it was shot in DD's studio using a virtual camera so they could see the actors within the environment. This studio of theirs is apparently really amazing "with creative's comprehensive services and capabilities that can't be found anywhere else under one roof... Studio offers performance driven facial capture and the largest dedicated motion capture sound stages in LA"
They've gt a good team lead by Gary Roberts too. But they're not selfish you can sort of hire it and use all the equipment as well as get expert advice and help. Which sounds like a win win to me.
Well anyways... back to the Trailer...
After they shot their footage they went to town on creating the lighting, cloth simulations and badass explosions to make it all come together, make it more realistic. And lets face it it's pretty amazing, I love the whole thing the story and the visuals, I mean I could rant on forever how I love what Bungie are doing so I'm going to stop right here.
Just watch it, and hopefully you'll turn into this impatient person I am when thinking about Destiny c: And if that's what it's doing to people, then I think they did their job right! It's supposed to make you want it so much!!

Double Negative - Research

During last year's BAF we had the pleasure of meeting Vanessa Boyce. 

She worked on things like Cloverfield, Batman and Inception.

She gave us a few tips on creating environments, and since this brief fits it a bit I decided to go back and look at what she taught us again.

She made it quite clear that you should use your references well. She said her and her team went to town and took thousands of photographs of big and little things, for the reference, just in case they might need it for something. Also they looked at lighting and the way it makes things work around town. She made us understand how important the light actually is, showed us before and after, and it makes a huge difference. 

Another thing I found very important is to make things IMPERFECT, nothing in this world is perfect so her job is to make sure everything is imperfect, and that's how she makes things work, that's how she makes everything fit in and just overall work together. 

Detail and little things are also very important, she mentioned smoke, dust, shadows, patterns... if it's a road make sure there's rubbish etc. just so it makes sense, no road is clean. 

I personally love Cloverfield so I decided to killjoy it for myself and see how it's done, and to be honest I expected lots of greenscreen and 3D modelling, but not to this extent! Nearly everything it seems has been shot against a green or a blue screen. Simple things like, the street etc. woah, just wow.
I mean don't get me wrong, that just means those guys are amazing at what they do, cause I'd never realize, and I read a few comments etc, and nobody else did either.
It's an interesting and well thought through process everyone goes through, just to make little things work.
I watched this video on here:
http://strictlyvfx.com/the-vfx-of-cloverfield/
And I personally love how they've done the bridge scene.
I feel for all the artists, as well as the actors in this, I can't imagine trying to act something out, react to things that you can't even see in a completely empty green environment. Because that's what it was, just a green space, with people in it :') But they did an amazing job on it, with the bridge falling and the supports failing.
And I feel like I keep saying it and saying it over and over again, but it's all about layers and layers of things :') Just pile lots of awesome on top of each other and you'll get amazing results. I think I keep repeating it so it sticks in my own head, but instead of saying all the time, I might just try it out. c: 

VFX Breakdown - The Day After Tomorrow

I watched lots of breakdowns for The day after tomorrow, simply because I love the movie.
I liked the tsunami one because I like the way they made it... I think they made a little model and just let lots of water through it, it's something I'd like to try myself one day that's why it caught my eye. It's similar to what they did to create lava in the star wars movies, so I suppose it's a well known and often used technique.
This is probably something I'd do if I ended up doing a tsunami myself, just because it'd be a good excuse to get my hands dirty :') I like to get away from the computer every now and then.
But because my mind is a little more set on the tornado I did watch this one with a lot of attention, I like how dark the scene is, there is just slight highlights, it has an amazing effect. Also it lets everything blend in together, since nothing is especially standing out.
For example I think if the scene was brighter I think it'd be too obvious that the buildings weren't originally there... And to be honest I'm not gonna lie, I just like dark mysterious things, so I'm in love with this dark scenery.
And again it all comes down to layers layers and more layers. Particles dust, shadows, highlights, and more particles, cause it's what brings it together, it'd look weird if it wasn't a layered mess.

After Effects induction

This post is literally, just notes I've been taking during the AfterEffects induction. Most of the time they might not make much sense...

a few techniques of managing a complicated composition.

break it up into managing chunks.

transferable skills that will apply to any kind of animation or video.

make a new solid layer

make it the size of the composition

t - gives you the opacity property

masks just like in Photoshop, we can apply exactly the same principle in AE

gotta use a vector shape, they're your masks

you can do those in AE, with a pen tool. or a shape tool. etc.

you choose the layer you wanna mask on.

here I just created a simple rectangle

all the bits outside the vector shape are transparent.

when you expand on it you can play around with things

you can edit it by using the move tool.

either by moving the anchor points, or by double clicking on an anchor points you can change the shape with edge and corner handles. 

you can create masks that will outline subject if you didn't use a green screen, to isolate them from a background,

select mask, double click on a rectangular tool to reveal the whole layer.

the layer is fully revealed and well work backwards to create a simple wipe.

animate the mask path here.

so it's a simple reveal of a mask. 

same if someone was moving from left to right you could use the same principal, just rather than scale it move it from left to right etc.

but obviously if it was a complex image, youd have to key frame it a little more, depends on how much movement there is. 

look into layertypes blending modes, a lil more. 

you can have as many masks as you like obvs. 

each mask is acting like a window through which you can see the video. 

youve got like different options, quite useful. 

can use multiple masks to create different effects.

ways on working on number on layers, sort of group them. 

apply keyframes that can animate a number of layers, make your life simple.

parent - child relationship. like in maya. 

duplicate a ball layer. for a back up in case it doesnt work.

appleD for duplicate

then create a solid, and make it a different colour, size is gonna be 200 by 200.

apply a mask to make it circular, eclipse tool then double click on it, that will apply the largest shape that it can to the mask. its now masking it off to be a circle.

then make another mask, use the pen tool and just have a shape inside the circle, set it to subtract and it'll cut a hole in your ball :') 

use convert vertex tool to edit your vertex and shape it however you wanna. 

make square wheels so we can see them rotating. 

establish parent children relationship before turning wheels.

select both wheels

r - rotate shortcut

It will reveal rotation property for both

The only thing the children thing doesn't work on, is opacity.

here you can see where to establish relationships between objects.

Its a small part of our finished animation so there was no need to have the composition huge. 

as long as frame rate etc was the same

this allows you to click on the anchorpoint and reposition it

the best way to move the anchor point

a - shortcut, anchor properties

s - scale

unlink x and y value by unticking this link icon.

animating chimney

changed its position scaled it, and changed the opacity so it fades as is goes off the screen

then obviously rotated the wheels, same way I ddi it before.

to repeat those 2-3 sets of key frames:

could copy and paste the keyframes.

or

use a script. In AE they are called expressions.

Its what makes it an extremely powerful animation software.

Java scripts they are.

hold alt and click the stopwatch

itd be useful to understand java scripts. 

use pick whip you can link two things together, position vs size for example, as it changes position it will scale. 

it can either be a property within the layer you're working on, or the property of another layer.

eg if you had a bouncing ball, rather than having to deal with the shadow you can pick whip the shadow to the position of the ball, so you don't have to key frame it, its just gonna get bigger and smaller and move as the ball bounces. any changes you make to the ball, the shadow will automatically update.

they are case sensitive, gotta be careful

loop script

we already have a ball layer that has a path

select that layer, hold alt key and drag your car composition on top of the ball layer. 

and it will exchange the two, so the car rides along the hills rather than the ball. 

to get something to orient so it follows the curve, we select the layer, go to layer transform, and select option for auto orient.  and choose the option to orient along the path

you can always double click on the composition linked in the other composition, it'll open it up and any changes you make in there, will automatically update to the thing its linked into. so you can edit it all you wanna. 

to fix the smoke, so it doesn't just cut off. it will make all the objects exist, even though in the original composition they were out of the frame. 

VFX breakdowns - Solomon Kane Scene

VFX breakdown of Solomon Kane Scene

I came across this one when looking at some vfx breakdowns. I was looking at those because I am to create a vfx breakdown of my own video. 

I fell in love with it because I love the character himself! I looove fiery detailed steamy characters. But enough of my loving, I enjoy watching them because you can pick up tips on how to recreate some effects they've used. I can also see how detailed the monster is, what's a 3D model and how much the texture brings into it, on top of  the particles and all sorts of other effects. It makes it a little easier when planning own things. When I'm in the process of modelling something I always worry it's too plain and simple... but here you can see how it's simple underneath all the layers, everything is simple on it's own but as a whole it makes a very complicated amazing piece!

I think at one point they show you all the layers that go into one shot next to each other, and it's a total of six, so that's six effects on top of a simple 3D model. 

I like it how when filming they just used a huge "lamp" in a way to show the positioning of the monster in the end. I think the glow from it was used in the end piece too!
Overall though, it's pretty amazing and I think I'm in love... 

Green Screen Masking

So we started with our green screen file.

The green screen shot wasn't perfect, too many shadows and different shades of green. So we eliminated it by masking most of it off.

We used this option in order to get rid of the weird shadow that was leftover from the green screen.

Because it's too obvious that the guys aren't from this shot we had to play around with colour levels to try and match the environment.

 

copy the keyed footage, and delete the effects on them

Create some shadows, to make it look natural, fit in a little better.

Here I decided I didn't like the colours still so I played around with those a little more.

 before

after. 

Done.