bug - my short with lots of effects

I didnt know that Shake had good roto capabilities already within the program. I thought that you had to get Silhouette Roto + Paint. I've downloaded demo versions of Silhouette and really liked it, hopefully the native roto abilities in Shake are similar.

Could you elaborate more on how you created the atmospheric effects. I've tryed before and they have never came out as realistic looking as yours are in the piece, they were great.
 
casey warren said:
I didnt know that Shake had good roto capabilities already within the program. I thought that you had to get Silhouette Roto + Paint. I've downloaded demo versions of Silhouette and really liked it, hopefully the native roto abilities in Shake are similar.

Could you elaborate more on how you created the atmospheric effects. I've tryed before and they have never came out as realistic looking as yours are in the piece, they were great.
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the great thing about Shake's roto is the variable edge weighting. it feels very organic and percise.

as for the atmospherics, to create local light blooming on highlights within the image I would duplicate the layer, desaturate it, turn it to a screen blending mode, blur it, then adjust the layer's opacity for the desired result. depending on the shot i might colorize it.

for the really dense stuff, you first have to figure out where the light source would be and use that reference for when you create a mask for the solid layer. for the oil floating out of the toilet, I wanted it to be above, so i created the solid layer (one much larger than the comp area to give the mask room to blur) in whatever color you want, in this case, white. draw out the mask where you want it to be the most dense and turn up the feathering on the mask to whatever softness you want. you can create multiple layers with multiple masks for each, but I like doing only one or two for the sake of control and simplicity. adjust the opacity and color of the each one to suit your liking. usually above that I would apply an adjustment layer with color balance and levels applied so the fake atmosphere would follow the same color rules as the plate. I also added a lot of grain. this was a stylistic choice I made early on, but I found it helped out with a couple things. the grain made the atmospherics more textured, and it also hid some of the artifacts from the color corrected plate, being that the plate was an HDV source.

one last thing to note, always work in 16bit or higher mode to avoid banding. the banding gets really bad when you're in 8bit working with big gradients like this.

I hope this answers your question.
 
pretty frickin' cool

lots of provocative imagery

only crit = metal liquid flying around out of the toilet and then around the bathroom not as noisy and dingey as the rest of the shot.

great work.

jack
 
Awesome, thanks for the great info. Your film is very well done. I am going to go get working in After Effects right now and try out some of the techniques that you use.

Also, I am curious what program or workflow you use to do your Color Correcting. I have used After Effects alot because I can mask layers and CC specific colors. However, it kinda gets annoying going from AE back to FCP over and over again to CC.
 
Also said:
I used AE for CC on every shot. If you have Motion, you could do the same thing with better integration and a faster workflow. My recomendation would be to do pre-comps in Photoshop or have yor edit finalized before CC. Because my shots were effects heavy, I did the CC while still in AE and rendered out my shots longer than I needed for editing in Final Cut.
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I was looking around you site...pretty awesome stuff..I was wondering how you did the CC effects like the blue/white haze and lens horizontal lens flares in some of the images...like this one...

Also, did you shoot this footage with a DVX?


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that too was done in After Effects. the haze was done in the method previously described. the light streaking is the directional blur effect.

everything for "bug" and "seraphim" was shot on a Sony FX1. that specific example was down-rezed to 720p from 1080p.
 
awesome, the light streaks good awesome. Ive seen that effect in a lot of TV shows, Alias uses that effects alot, however I think they might have a special lens attachment or something because it tends to happen when the corners of the frame pass over a light source.

The fluid flame effects on your site looks really realistic. I love how when the hand clenches, and then opens again the flame responds very realistically with a poof up in the air.....looks darn good...did you also use Realflow and Cinema 4D for those effects or some other program??

Ive used an FX1 before, the footage from that camera looks really awesome, I dont see how so many other people can slam that camera, I mean, I know its HDV, but the grain pattern and color reproduction it produces look really nice. The still frames you have look exceptional.
 
the fluid effects are done with Maya fluids. I think you can do the same in C4D using StormTracer with Realflow, but from what I hear, Stormtracer is impossible to use. as a note, most people think fluids and liquid are the same in post. Realflow does liquid (like water). Maya does fluids (referring to the kind of calculations it does) which is like smoke, flames, clouds, etc ...

I did a lot of thinking before I got my camera. It was the FX1 or the DVX and at the time, the HVX wasn't even cloes to being released, and the price was too high. I know a lot of people are purists about codecs and color space, and to an extent I think its deserved. But for my purposes, I needed as much resolution as I could get for as cheap as possible. When it comes down to it, it matters little what codec is used as long as you create a compelling piece with good composition. I needed resulotion to do effects so thats why I made my decision the way I did. I don't regret getting an FX1 in the least.

I do agree with the 24p part of the argument, but thats an easy problem to fix with many solutions. The motion of 24p is by far artistically superior to any other frame rate.

also, thanks again for the nice comments!
 
thanks for the info

if you have time, you should put together some tutorials on the kind of stuff you are doing. I know a lot of other people are doing effects work with hi-end programs, and for the most part the stuff looks great, but in most cases the tutorials lack in showing how to achieve realistic looking results. The stuff you've made looks really real and it would be awesome if you made some tutorials to show how you did it. like matchmoving the plates and creating the digital hand to place the fire in, etc....
 
Ogrus said:
Why dont your posts go up?
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go up? I don't spend a lot of time on forums, so my lingo is a bit off.

also, sorry I can't help you out with tutorials. I'm just not good at explaining how things work. I learned by just playing around and watching a video tutorial here and there.

3D Fluff is good for basic C4D use.
http://3dfluff.com/

The Gnomon Workshop covers a lot of Maya and Shake stuff.
http://thegnomonworkshop.com/

CGTalk is a good community.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/

3D Attack has a good monthly PDF magazine with tons of tutorials and tricks:
http://www.3dattack.net/

some of these cost money, but I'm sure you can find them on the P2P networks. I'm lucky enough to have work pay for them. Beyond the tutorials, just play around. thats the best advice I can give. Remember there's no set way to do anything. If it looks right it is right (thats my personal golden rule).
 
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