Week Three Already!

Before I start, last week we focused on lighting so I'll post some pictures from that. We were assigned to portray a mood by only using lighting.

 

Now for the real deal, keying. Keying is when we take a shot and composite it into another. Like before, what better way to explain than to show an example. Actually, now that I think about it, this is almost like the other video with the car and the motorcycle. This time however, we have a plate (background) and footage of a person. We actually got to choose the footage and plates (which I organised for the whole class ;) Anyways, I chose a shot of a city street at night along with some footage of James, a student who graduated last block.

 

Now James was filmed on a greenscreen. This means that I have to extract the green and put him on top of the plate, making sure to get all the strands of hair! Not only am I overlaying him but, matching color and noise. For those who don't know I put an example of noise below :)

The project isn't due until Monday but I thought I'd get a head start so I'll post what I've done so far!

 

Noise on left, less noise on right

 

Lighitng Week Two

 

Sneek peek to week three project

 

 

Block Three!

 

 

It's already the beginning of week 3 ahhhhh! Time flies, especially when you take into account that there are only 12 weeks a block! I better get everyone all caught up then. So all in all block three is all about compositing. Compositing is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. What better way to show you what it means then with an example.

 

Week one the assignment was to composite a CG (Computer Generated) car into a scene with a motorcycle driving on the road. We would have to make the car drive behind the motorcycle. I'll throw together a quick breakdown so you can see what had to be done (im just learning the software though so the breakdowns will get better!). That brings up another point. Breakdowns are when the final shot is shown layer by layer to show the amount of work that went into the composite. These are mostly used when showing off work to employers, not so much for film. In film you want the final perfected shot. Anyways, heres that first shot, and a little teaser for something that I'm working on myself!

 

I almost forgot!  The software we use is NukeX for all those interested =)

 

Week One Assignment

Teaser

 

 

 

Re-Cap

Well I think its about time I get to writing in this thing again!

Since my last post we have done a few projects in class ending a big project towards the end of block 2, the group project.

One of the last weeks of block two we did a group project.  There were 4 leads with each team having 5-6 people in them.  I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of the leads to work on the project!  It went smoothly, however as I had predicted it had been a little chaotic towards the end.  We had 2 1/2 weeks to make a animated short with a story built around audio.  Each group got to choose there audio from a live action movie.  Now we couldn't simply recreate the scene in the movie with the audio, we had to make an entirely different plot.  This had to be nothing like the movie.  We spent the first day brainstorming and thinking of ideas for our short and by the end of the day had a good solid one.
Now the plan was to finish the animation at week 1 /12.  That would give us plenty of buffer time in case there were problems in the pipeline of the production, which there were..  We ended up working down to the last night to get the final video put together.  I had a great team, and they did a lot of work.  That is also something worth mentioning though.. Being the team lead I had the smallest part in the animation.  Now some other leads chose to do the hardest roles in the short, but here was my logic.  I had to make sure everything was running smoothly, check on people constantly to make sure work was getting done, help with problems (everyone in the group was coming to me with issues they were having).  Doing all that on top of having a major role in the animation would have been too hectic and caused me too much distraction from the group.  I think I made the rite choice in doing this, and in the end it payed off!  Our group got a 90/100  on the project.
I do have to say that if I was going to do this again I would change the pipeline a little (pipe line is a term we use in production, one task moving down the chain "pipe" to the next).

Group Project