3DSFX Project 1

Raw footage

Below is the raw footage I used for this project.

StoryBoard

Below is the storyboard that I drew out for this project.


Frame 1 and 2

Frame 3 and 4

Frame 5

Frame 6 and 7

Frame 8 and 9

Frame 10

Frame 11

Documentation

Scene 1

For this title scene, I use 5 optical flares of different and position it around the different areas of the background, I use “wiggle” code on the opacity of the 5 flares to make the flares shines randomly.

The 3DSFX text have “wiggle” code type as well in the position and scale to make the text move randomly and lastly stop in the middle of the screen, I also move it up a little and down all the way where the text is gone. I also make “glow” effect on the text.

Scene 2

Next is the words appearing after the energy wave go pass across the screen. The energy wave use is a preset, and I change the colour of it to orange and blue.

For the text I use “turbulent displace” as well as “fast blur” effects and opacity to make the text appear in a wavy and blurring features.

Lastly, doing the same thing again with a different direction of the energy wave and make the text disappear as how it appears using the same effects.

Scene 3

A white short text appears, with the background as rain using a preset.

Using two optical flares one of each colour blue and orange, at the top and bottom of the text to show different colour powers of the two rangers. I also brighten it and make the flares move slower at one point to highlight the effects of the flares.

Scene 4

Lastly for the text part, I use the energy waves again and duplicate into 2, of different colours orange and blue, both comes out from different way, one of the left screen and the other from the right.

When the energy waves meets each other, I once again use the “fast blur” and “turbulent displace” effects and opacity for the text title of the film to appear. I also use “glow” effect on the text title, once again the rain is still there.

Below is the production of the final title screen after the 4 scene.

Scene 5

A zoom in display of my starting fight scene of me in the video, no effects applied in this scene.

Scene 6

A zoom out of display of the middle footage of the fight scene where my enemy Vanan appears, and was taunting me to fight, I use the curves to make the overall colour of the film looks a little bit cooler tone, as well as the atmosphere preset with a lower opacity so it won’t be so smoky. I also set the atmosphere using curves to a little slightly more red in colour.

There is a slight camera shakes while the scene starts which is my camera man mistake as he slightly touch on the camera when he starts filming, but I find it pretty cool as it adds a little bit of starting tension of the film so I didn’t took the camera shake out.

Scene 7

After that, I charge to Vanan, where he shoots out a flare which the effect uses is optical flare, I make the flare a little bit brighter when going through the screen. I also make the “ripple” effect that follows through the flare so to make the flare have a wave-like effect when it goes across the screen.

I immediately bent down and dodge Vanan’s flare, where there were altogether five of me showing the process I dodge the attack. This effect is called the stromotion, where I need to mask out different parts of me and freeze frame at all five points, and using the camera tracker to position my mask and overlay above one another when the mask touch each other.

I also use slight wiggler controls to make the screen shake a little when Vanan flare travel pass the screen.

Scene 8

After I dodge Vanan attack, I immediately jumped up and shoot a flare which is another optical flare with a different looks and orange colour.

Vanan uses a shield which is a preset to block my attack, where I use the curves to change the shield to blue colour. When the orange flare of mine hit the shield, I put in another cork hit smoke which is another presets, for the explosion make. I made the colour of the smoke slightly red using the curves.

I also use the wiggler once again which I make the shake stronger in compatible to the explosion made. I also use “ripple” effect for the explosion to make it look more realistic.

Scene 9

After the explosion, I immediately shoot another orange optical flare with a different looks at Vanan, and make the whole screen become white and bright due to the flare explosion. I make the colour of flare turns white for the explosion.

Scene 10

Last part of the battle, where I mask Vanan out and put it in another layer which is the same scene but without him. I then use the “shatter” effect on Vanan and make him shatter, while I also add “glow” and “fast blur” on the shatter part. I also add another small blue optical flare represents the soul of Vanan and the shatter parts of him along with the soul flew up to the sky.

I make another wiggler control for the scene for the camera shakes when Vanan shatter, as well as powder hit presets which I make it a little red for the explosion when he shatters.

Below is the production of the final battle scene from scene 5 to scene 10.

Scene 11

Last part is the ending scene where I use “stroke” effect to write out the words, I also downloaded a different font for the text.

I use the preset blood splatter and change it to a different colour so it is like paint splatter instead, changing the colour to purple. I use a wallpaper for the background.

Below is the production of the ending screen for scene 11.

After all these 11 scenes, I add them up together and render out as the project 1 Final Video with sound effects, as well as all my efforts put in to it. Hope you enjoy and like my final video!

Project 1 Final Video

Reflection:


The first individual major project that I have done! Felt so good after completing this project. And I felt that I have done a good job for this project. Although there is still improvements to be made, I felt that from all I have learnt, I actually done it pretty well. Hope that I can score good grades for it! The whole scene was sort of like a fighting scene, where I follow some of the tutorials in "videocopilot" as well as "aetuts" website, like stromotion, magical hits and also some title sequence. I am glad that I am able to implement the techniques from the tutorials into one of my own footage. I also use some of the presets that is found in Action Essential II tools. I actually spent quite a long time doing this short film, as I am using After Effects CS4, and it keeps crashing sometimes, so I got really frustrated at times. Nevertheless, I still hang in there and completed the project, best part is I save the project for every step I done, so that I won't need to do it all over again if the After Effects crashed. Overall, I find this project very meaningful, and I really really did learnt a lot through the different tutorials that I have gone through, and how to apply them in your own footage. I really hope that I done well for this project, also continuing to work even harder and give a better result in the upcoming project 2!

Cheers!

Week 3 - Lab 1, 2 and 3

Lab 1 - Part 1

For this whole lab exercises, we will be touching on colors, which is quite a new thing to me in After Effects, since we have not done any color correction or color changing in the previous exercises.

After following through the 9 short tutorials about colors, I have learnt quite a lot about the different tools and functions in After Effects about colors.

Below are some of the sample images that I have done, before and after I have apply the different coloring tools in After Effects.

For the 1st image, I have darken the overall lighting of the image using levels, as well as slightly increasing the pink factors using hue and saturation. Lastly, I use the curves tool and lower the red factor by slightly only a little. I decided to make the image look a little bit darker as the girl in the picture doesn't smile, which gives sort of a cool tone to it thus I feel that the lighting must be darken down by a little to make the image looks more fitting in par with the girl mood.

Original Image

Edited Image

For the second image, I decide to change the contrast of the image to a more warmer tone. I feel that the warm tone looks good on the girl image, as the mood of the image is sort of happier compared to the 1st image. Thus, I use the curves to reduce the blue channel greatly, and the opposite of blue is yellow, thus the image will turn into yellow first. Next, I slightly increase the red channel using curves as well, and also using hue and saturation to turn the image a little orange in color. Lastly, using the color balance, which I think is a great coloring tool to touch up on the color of the image.

Original Image

Edited Image

Lab 1 - Part 2

For the second part of Lab 1, we are task to reverse the color tone of the 2 given video, the "Warriors Way - Flashback.wmv" as well as "Warriors Way - Showdown.wmv", we are entitled to reverse their color tone with one another, so the "Showdown" to a cooler tone which is blue, and "FlashBack" to a warmer tone which is around orange in color. Below is the original footage as well as the ones that I have edited accordingly to the task given.

For the 1st "Showdown" footage, I used the curves to slightly reduce the red channel, as well as increase the blue channel significantly. Next, I use the color balance tool, to once again reduce slightly the red tone, and slightly increasing the blue tone. With the blue channel increase by a lot, it gives a very cool tone to the footage, I also use the hue and saturation to touch up on the color tone of the footage to make it look better.

Original Footage

Edited Footage

For this second footage, it is slightly harder to do than the previous footage. I once again use the curves and reduce the blue channel greatly, where it will turn the whole footage yellow if you reduce the blue channel by a lot. I then increase the red channel slightly, so that the footage with turn to orange instead. However, I found that orange looks a little weird on the footage, and that slightly brownish will be just perfect for the fight scene, depicting a little bit of sun setting fighting scene in a mountain area with muddy and soil which is have a brownish atmosphere. Thus, I use the color balance as well as hue and saturation to slightly increase the red channel a little more, and it will turn the tone a little brownish for the footage.

Original Footage

Edited Footage

Lab 2 - Part 1

For the second Lab, we learnt more in-depth about color correction, where we need to follow the two given tutorials, "Primary color correction" and "Secondary color correction", and use the given image to color correct the background and less important items, where our main point is to let the audience focus more on the two main characters rather than the unneccesary background stuffs. Below is the original and edited version of the image after I have done the color correction by following the both tutorials. I done both together as the 2 videos are linked towards one another.

After following both the tutorials, I have use the new tool called color finesse 3 (for me is color finesse 2 in Adboe CS4). The color finesse tool is an awesome tool which is like all-in-one color correction feature, with curves, levels, color balance and more!

For the 1st primary color correction tutorial, we done color correction for the background, where we focus on the 3 main colors, white, grey and black, which can be found in the guy shirt collar (white), background shirt at the most right of the scene (grey), and lastly the woman shirt with a black patch in between her hand and her shirt (black). By hightlighting on all tthe 3 colors, we can reduce all of the white, grey and black in the whole background, not only the selected items. We also put a mask around and slightly feather it, so that the focus now goes to the middle.

For the 2nd secondary color correction tutorial, we will focus on the most notorious red bucket below the guy. The red bucket is too bright and becomes the center of attention for the image. Thus, by using color finesse tool, we can highlight the whole red bucket slowly, and reduce its saturation so that it is alot less brighter.

The image is in some tif. format where I can't view it, thus in After Effects, I don't know how to export it out so I render out as a video instead.

*My color finesse 2 is in trial version, thus will have the purple grid line on it, I apologise for the cause.

Original Image

Edited Color Correction Image turns Video?

Lab 2 - Part 2

In this second part of the lab, we are going to apply what we have done previously, which is reducing some of the bright in color attention seeking items, the "Flag" and the "Pope's shirt".

Both were very similar to that of the previous exercise, which is to reduce the saturation of the red bucket. For both, you just have to highlight the red color part of the flag, as well as the red color part of the pope shirt, and reduce the saturation greatly similar to how you have done it for the red bucket. If you select the red from the flag or the pope shirt, all the surrounding of the background with the similar red will be reduce together along with the flag and pope shirt red color. This excercise is pretty easy and straight foward to be done.

*My color finesse 2 is in trial version, thus will have the purple grid line on it, I apologise for the cause.

Original Footage

Edited Color Correction Footage

Original Footage

Edited Color Correction Footage

Lab 3 - Part 1

In this lab, we will follow the tutorial "Bleach Bypass" in our most famous videocopilot website. A very simple tutorial which teach us about the bleach bypass technique. We just have to increase the brightness and contrast of the image, and lastly, use the "CC Composite" and change the mode to color. Thus, the whole image will turn brighter in both brightness and contrast, but still it depends on your footage, and the bleach bypass will act accordingly to the footage coloring.


Original Footage

Edited Bleach Bypass Footage

Lab 3 - Part 2

In this final lab exercise, which I find it the most difficult of all, where we need to color correct two different footage from what we have learnt so far during the whole Week 3 exercises. Although we have an image reference to follow what is the best to correct the color of the footage, I still take a long long time to color correct the footage to the best that I could done.

I have use the color finesse to do all the work that I could done. For the first footage, I massively reduce the red channel in the curves, as well as slightly increasing the blue channel. I also slightly increase the brightness of the footage using the levels. I tried other stuff like hue and saturation, as well as color balance, but it didn't go very well, and the color looks like is all mess-up, thus using the curves and levels provided in the color finesse, this is the best I could have done to color correct the footage. It may not look perfect, but I think it is still presentable.

*My color finesse 2 is in trial version, thus will have the purple grid line on it, I apologise for the cause.

Original Footage

Edited Footage

For the second footage, I actually got really fed up as the color was all mess up and really hard to color correct it. Thus, I actually mask out seperately the sky and the ground and color correct them differently with one another. Using color finesse, for the sky part, I reduce the green channels in the curves greatly as well as increasing the blue channel, also increase the brightness slightly using level as it looks a little dark. For the ground part, same thing using color finesse, I reduce the red channel greatly in the curves and increase the green channel in it, also make it brighter using levels. It appears that the masking is not obvious and can't be seen, as I feather the mask and successfully achieve what I want which is to hide the audience about the masking. Overall, this is the best that I could done, pretty much looks good and quite nicely done.

Original Footage

Edited Footage

Reflection:

For this whole week of exercise, we will be touching on something new, which is color correction. I find these exercise rather simple, but, if you want to get the perfect coloring, you must really spent time and efforts, cause is not really easy to perfect all the coloring in these exercises. Some of the exercises I tried a lot of time to get the coloring right, but sometimes, I feel that it is still up to personal views about the different color standard of one another, as different people have different views and likes about different colors. However, there is still a universal indicator on which colors suit best on which image atmosphere or any purpose it have on the color of the image. Still, through these exercises, I learnt a lot about colors and contrast that I didn't know previously. Through these 3 weeks, I learnt a lot about After Effects and hope that I could continue to improve on it!

Week 2 - Lab 3 (James Bond)

Lab 3 (James Bond)

For this exercise, we need follow the "James Bond" tutorial and do the same thing as what the tutorial has done. While we have something like the tutorial to follow, the exercise is still very tedious. I think because this is one of my first major lab exercise where we need to create something more differently from what we have previously done. Although the exercise is tedious and took me at least an hour and more to complete, this exercise is not that difficult, is pretty straight forward and easy to follow, just that it requires a lot of steps and sometimes if you follow wrongly errors may occur, where you need to re-follow again which is time wasting.

The starting part looks difficult where the balls move towards the right and disappear and generate one another when moving along the way. However, after that I have follow the tutorial, it is rather simple, just create a null object and make the ball follow it's position, from left to right, and also for the ball part to disappear and generate another one, is just freeze frame the ball and changing of the opacity.

For the second part, we need to create different layers for the background, as well as using the cc cylinder to make the spiral pattern background of james bond. Next, masking out the hole in the middle, so we can see through the hole and reveal James Bond. Create another null object and use it to move from right to left of the position. We just have to parent the position of the spiral background, the masking to the null object. This create the mask and background following James Bond as he walk to the middle of the scene.

The last part will be the blood and the ending. The blood is the opposite of what I think is hard to make, but in the end you just need to create a solid, and make it red in color, put it on top above the scene and mask out the shape of the blood at the bottom of the solid. Lastly, just drag it down in position to make the blood effect, I have also edited the blood where the bottom of the blood some of them move slower, while some of them move faster to create a more realistic blood flowing down. The ending part is where you have to move the mask hole along with the spiral pattern background left and right and lastly down to the bottom left of the scene and end it there. Also, change the background of James Bond to white in the mask hole when reaching the ending part. This is how to whole thing is works!

Below is the actual video that I have done following the "James Bond" tutorial!

Below is another video that I have edited using the above James Bond video that I have done out. I change the background color slightly to purple, as well as adding text of his name "James Bond", added background music, where when the text "James Bond" appears it coordinates with the background music where it says "James Bond" as well. Lastly, I change the blood flow effect, using the "cell pattern" tool, and make the blood move down in block by block similar to the cell pattern moving down. I find it pretty cool and look nicer after I have edited from the original video that I have done.

Reflection:

I must say this is one of the most fun exercise out of all the previous exercises, mainly is because this is one of the first major exercise that I have done from scratch, not like any of the previous ones where you edit effects from an already done video. I really learnt a lot through this exercise more than the one I previously done. I have fun doing it, although it is rather tedious and frustrating at times if you follow wrongly and need to re-do again. But still, this one is my personal favourite! I decided to edit some of the items in the video so that it has the orignality rather than all of the same old pattern style by following the tutorial. Personally, the blood flowing is one of my favourite, I find it pretty cool using the cell pattern tool, that the blood sort of overlay one another down to the end. After spending quite some time doing this, I have a feeling of achievement after completing the exercise, hope that we can do more this kind of fun and meaningful exercises! Cheers!

Week 2 - Lab 1 (E-learning) and Lab 2

Lab 1 (E-learning)

For his week lab work which is e-learning, we will be doing on some tracking and screen replacement using the given video "Fringe hospital bed" which can be found in olive.

For this exercise, we do not have any tutorials to follow through, however, this exercise is sort of very similar to what we have done on "Week 1 - Lab 3", which is replacing video in the scene using track motion. I found it similar to what we have done previously, thus I decide to do more for the exercise rather than just doing the same replacement of video in the scene where there is no screen movement.

I decide to replace the video from the monitor screen from the start, where the camera of the whole video screen move along slowly to make the monitor screen appear. I find it a little challenge as I didn't done it before. Along with the help of my friends, I manage to done it quite well I guess, it is actually not that difficult after all.

Firstly, I split the video into 2 different parts, one is showing the whole monitor, while the other part is the one with the camera slowly moving towards the monitor. For the 1st part, we use the same thing as we have done before, which is the perspective corner pin. For the second part which is abit more tricky, we need to use another track motion to track from the nose (which is one of the better starting track point) which is what i have done where we must go along with the movement of the camera screen towards the monitor. Lastly, we must position it at the monitor screen from the start so that the video won't start to appear and move from the nose where we start to track it. For the last part where the guy wakes up, it is the same thing using perspective corner pin to track and replace the video. I also added some sound effect to make the whole scene looks abit more funnier at the start and more creepy at the ending part.

Below is the video scene that I have done, along with the sound effects. Enjoy!

Lab 2

In this lab, we will be doing on a simple exercise called the "Track Matte". This is a rather simple exercise where we just need to input a text title and use the track matte option in After Effects to make the text blend in together with the background.

There is an option in the After Effects track matte, where we selece alpha matte so that the text will blend in with the background of the video. Lastly, we add in bevel alpha, along with the drop shadow tool to make the text looks better with shadow effect and a little bit of coloring on it.

Below is the "Track Matte" video that I have done, the video may be a little lag, I think my quality for the video is a bit higher than normal, but i try to render out in low quality to minimise the lag, turns out when I upload the video it keeps blinking, I think the lag cause the video to become like that when I uploaded it, I apologise for the cause.

Reflection:

We have come to the second week of this subject, so far I'm doing quite well up to now. For his week exercises, I find it quite simple while also learning some of the basic tracking in After Effects. I find the E-learning pretty cool, where I successfully done the 1st part which is tracking from a moving scene, I thought it will gonna be quite hard, but after I done it is actually quite easy to do. I think that's all for now, I'm gonna start my James Bond tutorial, hope it won't be too boring and is fun to do!