The brief for the Animation Techniques for Visual Effects project required us to create a 30 second to 1 minute short using live footage, 3D, text, audio and evidence of techniques we have learnt during classes this semester. These include Chroma keying, compositing and tracking.
I decided to make a 1 minute long music video using the track Make You Mine by Talay Riley. After using green screen footage in class to create a silhouette e.g. the iPod adverts, I wanted to use this technique in my project, as I thought it was simple but extremely effective.
After deliberating for a week or so, I decided I wanted the video to be a panorama, with the camera following the characters around a scene. I quickly decided I wanted to use a wood or park for the background footage, so I took a camera and tripod up to Western Park in Sheffield where I shot the background plate. This was relatively simple and didn’t cause me any problems. I used the music track to try and make sure the timing was the same in every take, and also to make sure that I finished a 360 degree spin in the 1 minute time slot. I did several passes at slightly different speeds so I had choices when it came to editing the footage. I think this is always a good idea, having too many choices is better than not having the shot you require and having to go back out on location to reshoot the footage. I was pleased with my progress as I had developed an idea and shot the backgrounds within 3 weeks of starting the semester.
Once I had edited the background footage, I was ready to shoot my characters. This took quite a bit of preparation because I needed to use the green screen studio at Sheffield Independent Film for the shoot, which caused a problem, as it is not a 360 degree green screen. After speaking with my tutor I decided to split the shots into 3 and shoot roughly 120 degrees at a time. I booked the studio and took my actors down to shoot. Surprisingly it didn’t take too long to shoot the footage I needed, despite asking my friends to dance! We did plenty of takes and everything seemed to be running extremely smoothly.
However when I came to edit the green screen footage, I realised that I had tried so hard to fit the action into the small green screen space that I hadn’t noticed the significant amounts of green spill on my actors and shadows on the green screen. At this point I knew I wouldn’t have time to reshoot all of the footage, and even if I did, the same problems would occur again because of the lack of space. I therefore decided that the only way around it would be to manually rotoscope my characters to remove the shadows, and to play around with contrasts and keying techniques to fix the spill problem. After hours of rotoscoping, I managed to remove all of the shadows, which I was really pleased with. I will definitely remember in the future to pay attention to lighting to avoid this kind of problem occurring again.
After I had finished the green screen editing and composited it together with the background footage in After Effects it was time to work on the text and 3D elements of the brief. I am not very confident when it comes to working with 3D and hadn’t used it since the first semester last year, so I wanted to keep the 3D element simple, but still relevant to the story I was developing. I therefore decided to create a 3D model heart and balloon, which I would duplicate, animate and add to the rest of my project. Modeling the heart and balloon was fairly simple, and after a bit of help from a friend, I familiarised myself with the software again. However, I was unsure about how to animate the models realistically in 3D software so put this element to the side for a while.
I then began focusing on the text element. I knew I wanted to use meaningful phrases from the music and have them look handwritten on the floor of the park or in the sky. I looked up a tutorial from last year and used After Effects to create the handwritten effect. This was really simple to do and I was impressed by how effective the text looked using only a simple technique. I then added the text to the rest of the project.
At this point I felt I was nearing the end of the project and was pleased to nearly be finished. However after the crit session, I realised there were some problems I needed to address and some different ideas were given to me, ideas I have to admit I liked better than my originals. I went back into the silhouette footage and began looking more closely at my rotoscoping. I knew it wasn’t really good enough and decided to go through it again and tweak the masks for a better result. I knew that I should have been more precise the first time around, but at the time I think I was anxious to fix the footage. Going back and looking at the footage again was definitely a good idea and I will remember that in future projects, to go back and ask myself if I can improve on what I’ve already done.
When the rotoscoping was done I began to explore another area that had come up in the crit session. It was suggested that I create my text in 3D for the 3D element, instead of using the handwriting effect, as a way of adding more depth to the scene, as at the moment everything looked flat on the screen. I thought this was a really good idea and would be easier than trying to animate the 3D hearts and balloons, which is something I had been putting off, as I was not really sure how to tackle it. I created the text in 3D Studio Max and added it into my After Effects scene, where I positioned the phrases at the correct points in the song and animated them to move across the scene.
When I had finished adding all of the elements, I watched it all back and was really pleased with the results. My final 1 minute short is almost exactly as I first pictured it, obviously with a couple of creative changes along the way. I feel that I have learnt a lot software wise in this project, as well as learning to go back and look at every element of a project to see if it can be improved. If I could redo any element of my project, I would rethink a way to film the green screen footage to avoid the problems I had and to try and make it better than it is at the moment. But all in all I am pleased with the progress I have made this semester and feel confident that I could use the techniques I have learnt during this project in other projects and in the future.
