help with this effect

[Thomas J. O'Hara]

how would I go about making something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K8GYl5-xrM


I shot the live footage and I'm ready to bring it into AE.
The parts where he grabs photos and throws them around...how do i make it look like he's grabbing the pictures? I've never taken on a project like this before with live action compositing, any help would be appreciated. If you want to take a stab at it, I can send my raw footage.

[Gary Parkinson]

Understanding the concept of animating masks is the main rule here, the elements he pushes around where most probably done in a 3D app, however you can acheive a good result just using AE, you'll need to know how to track objects and apply the right amount of motion blur etc, it can be done quite easily when you know how.

How good you want it to look depends on how much time you want to spend on it. I've spent days working on 3-4sec of one effects shot in AE.

[Gary Parkinson]

Sorry Thomas that probably didnt help at all, if I had time I'd be more than happy to have a stab at it.

Have a look at www.videocopilot.net (http://www.videocopilot.net) (if you havnt already) and see if there is anything there that can help, they have some great tutorials.

[Matt Grunau]

Video copilot really wont help much here. You can do this in AE to a degree, but if you notice when he throws the pictures, they bend. Bending means that portion at the very least used a 3D program with the pictures being the texture on a 3D object.

You can't get AE layers to bend like that. If you are ok not having them bend, all you need to do is do a motion track of your hand (easy in this case since it was against a dark brown shirt), and keeping the hand holding the photos the same shape as you grab with the other hand and throw towards the screen. I brought up keeping the hand the same shape so you don't really have to do anything but change positing and rotation of the mask, something most easily done by doing a motion track, applying the track data to a null, and parenting the photo layers to the null.

The picture layers will have to be st up as 3D layers too, unless you want to just scale them. I'de use 3D layers to get the correct motion blur.

[Thomas J. O'Hara]

Thanks guys, i'll mess around with it.

I'm having trouble with the opening sequence, I want to write my name with my finger, but I want it to have this effect:

http://www.trapcode.com/gallery.html (a little more than halfway down the page, the one by Jason Koxvold)

I have particular but I really suck at it. There's so many controllers I don't know what to do. The one problem I may have is that I didn't use an LED for a point of reference... so i'm having trouble motion tracking my finger.. should I just reshoot?

[Drew Ott]

That motion tracked finger effect is pretty cool with the trails of light.

If you figure it out, be sure to let us know what you did.

[William_Robinette]

If you look around the internet, there is a video BTS done by the company that shot this for HP. They go pretty in depth about one they did (possibly P Diddy?).

[Thomas J. O'Hara]

ya i found those, but unfortunately it's all done with 3-D apps. So I'm just going to have to make my lesser-quality AE version.

[Thomas J. O'Hara]

here's a test of the name writing portion. Is there a better way to do it? I hate how it's so blocky-looking. I was hoping it would be smoother.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weYTl5HoC0U

all i did was use particular and keyframe the particle X and Y positions.