Once you get started w/ plug-ins in AE... goodbye normal life

[Five O'Clock Charlie]

Years of reading forums like this was finally put to practice... Twas my directorial (and my new ad agency's) debut.. hooray. But what surprised me about my Afer Effects work on this theoritically mid-range (afa work load) tv spot, and some in Pr as well, was how extensively I used a range of plug-ins.

It's a reminder of how many tools can be used to add those minute details to flesh out a scene if you have time, and how much you can sacrifice on set to save time (this was 2 half-days, so no live fire, few practical smoke resets, etc.) This was VCP: Opt Flares, Action Ess. 2, Riot Gear, Pro Score, Designer FX... and Red Giant Colorista, MB Looks, Cosmo, a little Mojo, etc.

I'm new to real color grading, so I went a little crazy trying to anticipate our washed out local stations, but the important thing is the option's there!


http://youtu.be/qsTrfrfTpXc?hd=1

Cheers

 

[bgodoy]

Hahaha I'm right there with you. What would we do without plugins? Nice spot. The grade looks great (it really does) and I love the fact that there is a bit of humor in there as well. Keep it up.
-B

 

[Five O'Clock Charlie]

OK, cool. Glad the grade comes across as decent! Mainly, trying to pop the orange to make the smoke less-dull looking led to lots of other tweaking to keep a bit of normalcy. Wasn't sure. But anyway, great thing about the plug-ins (and the straight AE elements) in this case is nobody has questioned whether or not specific items were done in post. So I guess we hit an ok balance on things like the optical flares attached to the smoke grenades, vfx paint splats, extra vfx smoke, etc.

Anyway, on to find the next client to fund my new plug-in addiction!