Adding the title sequence

I did some research into typography before i started looking at different types of styles and what would suite my shot best. I picked a ariel type which i would colour in white as it looks professional and bears are white. I think i'm going to fade it in and out, this will make it look more spooky alien like. Alex helped me figure out maya here bless him, after this module i'm going to do quite a few tutorials on occlusion pass's, they are really helpful and can get some fantastic results. 

Scoot Pilgram Vs The Polar Bears

Scoot pilgram is FULL of vfx shots, i think pretty much every scene has something vfx in it which is awesome because that's what the story is, a videogame. So when i had all my footage together in final cut i realised that it didn't look fully complete. Like the screensaver- ness was making it and the split screen looked better but i thought i need to do a little more research to figure out what it could be missing. And from scott Pilgram i figured this out, i t didn't look cartoony enough and you couldn't tell fully it was a music video the bears were performing through. So i added in some black solids in after effects to create a frame around each shot when the animation began, i also added in a red question mark to make it more cartoony and show more that she was confused, it also gave a humour-us add to it. 

So here's a trailer for scott Pilgram if you haven't seen it and like vfx i suggest you watch it, there's never a dull moment it's great and they have the characters played perfectly by the actors, Ramona even looks like Ramona from the scott pilgram game! 

EPIC SONG-

Black sheep by Metric

(Sang by Brie Larson in this scene)

Here's also some screenshots from me adding this too my video.

Movie Special Effects You Won't Believe Aren't CGI

I found this fascinating article by David Christopher Bell about special effects you wouldn't believe weren't CGI, it was such an interesting read here's a few examples -

The Dark Knight Rises -
Remember the scene where batman's chasing the joker and there after Harvey Dent and that massive white truck flips over, well this wasn't touched with vfx or anything in any way. They literally went down to chicago, closed off a street and flipped a massive ass white truck.

From reading this article it just made me look at stuff more and think around things how i might be able to use tricks to create things that look like vfx. Little illusions like Lord of the rings and in Star treck if they want someone to look really small or something to look insanely big and the character has got there back to the shot, they wont use vfx, they will buy a wig and stick it on a kid and put him in the shot. Genius stuff. 

here's the link to the website if you wanna look at them all.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19140_8-movie-special-effects-you-wont-believe-arent-cgi.html

Split Screen/ Tinting/ animating the shots & adding the finishing touches

Annabeth gave me a great idea to do a split screen effect so i researched into music videos and films such as scott pilgram to get a more music/band effect in the video. I placed the split screens where i thought they would look best and put them in for a humour value. 

I also added a little bit of masked lighting that Matt showed me how to do, a great tip to learn which i will use in the future.

I also used a simple render of a high resolution shot of my image background so that i could insert it behind Jeff so that she looked like she fit in the scene more. It worked well :)

I messed around with the curves and tint colours in after effects to make the smoke look more like the beam colour so it would fit more, i also added a smoked teleport in so that it made sense and she didn't just appear out of nowhere.

Trying out tinting - didn't look great. Another time maybe for something else though?

I really understand masking so mich more than i did at the start of this module, it's a great skill to have and i will develop this further and look more into it. 

freeze frame was a good move to learn. 

Render Layers

Matt showed me how to do render layers, this came in handy so much and i can't believe i didn't know anything about it before, it makes everything so much easier and the fact that you can quickly turn off or edit the settings of a specific camera is a real help.

Looking at Music Video style's

As i was rendering and putting everything together i realised that my music video because that's what it kind of turns into is a bit still. Like when the camera goes from the guitarist to the drums nothings really happening. So i researched into music videos, looking at what proper studios do and i found a lot of examples and ideas which could help. From this i thought about how i could change my animation/music video from looking a little still and thought maybe if i animated the shots moving in like a cheesy screensaver shot in after effects it would look more music video like and it completly worked.

I also tried doing a tint y'know cause from real life and festivals you know that theres always alot of lights changing so i wanted to get this point across that it was a rock band, i animated the lights to fade from colour to colour in after effects but the final result didn't look as good as the one without the tint's so i changed it back.

Here's some links to videos i looked at for some reason the video wont load up -
top 10 cheesy music video's

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

top 30 music videos of all time
http://entertainment.time.com/2011/07/28/the-30-all-time-best-music-videos/slide/michael-jackson-thriller-1984/

Guitar Hero

I looked into guitar hero as Matt told me that they actually play on a loop animation which is what i'm doing with my bear, it was great to watch these videos and when you look closely you can actually see it. I looked at the instruments and stage and i'm happy with my whole thing it matches the idea of a stage and you can understand what everything is and whats going on. Take a look at these videos they were great references and information. 

Adding Special Effects in After Effects

I learned so much about after effects in this module, i did a few practise attempts as i wanted to get the beam and smoke stuff correct. Luca kindly gave me some videos of effects like sparks and smoke happening so i learned how to use them which was a real help and they looked great. 

Here's some screenshots of my work process and progress and a video of the test beam which changed later to make it better and more colourful. 

using welding for the broken language sign. 

what i got from Luca - 

BEAM BEAM!!1

gotta remember to set everything to 25fps

Ceo Lo Green - Fuck you

This is one of the best music video's i've seen as in title sequences and the style of it. It all fit's together perfectly and tells a great story. From learning after effects i can depict whats going on now in this video how they would have duplicated the layers a few times and then changed the colour and opacity to make a silhouette of colour around the live footage. I really like the fact that i can see this now because three months ago i couldn't. Give this video a watch it's just vfx all over it's great.

Industry Websites I've been snooping around in :)

Here's some websites that i looked at that the third years told me about. All of them were really interesting to look at at to see how companies do things there way. Some of them are have worked on batman and are working on iron man 3 currently, it's great that you can easily investigate this through a website.
These websites helped a lot for information on how vfx should look in different styles, i'll definitely be keeping up to date with these and checking the progress of them regularly.  

http://www.dneg.com/
http://digitaldomain.com/
http://www.themill.com/
http://www.theuniononline.com/official/
http://c4artists.com/
http://www.shadevfx.com/

Masking's away!

talk about what you did what you learned, techniques and that you could mask separate objects like the box so that it kept it colour etc...

I learned that you could actually mask objects separate it just depends what layer is where like in photoship