Check me out in this short clip as I do battle in the climactic Arena sequence from the end of Episode II.
My first attempt at greenscreen keying! I keyed this in After Effects using Primatte, and then to make me look like I "belong" in the environment I sampled a shade of brown from the background and color overlyed that onto myself, and then did a little bit of lightwrap on my edges. I also keyframed myself to move with the shot and actually enlarge toward the end to fake the animorphic distortion of the shot.
If some frames of the background look like they repeat and/or distort, it's because they do. The footage of myself is 29.97 frames per second (FPS) while my shot from AOTC is 23.98. To get them to match I ended up using MotionPerfect to morph the AOTC shot into 29.97 FPS. Clearly action shots are not the easiest to morph, and it had some difficulty, but this is just a test clip after all.
About 3 seconds, no sound, 1.4 MB
CAMPTRIX OPENING TITLE
Well, it was just a matter of time before I tried the Matrix "Raining Code" effect, and I think I was pretty successful with this parody. It's one of the most accurate looking ripoffs I've seen, at least. I used After Effects and Photoshop, but I won't even start to discuss how it was made because I did it the hardest, most manual way possible and there's many other, easier ways to do it. (this was made for someone else's Matrix fan film)
A funny little spin on a brief scene from Attack of the Clones. (made as a bumper for TFN Fan Films, but probably can never be used due to the blatantly plagiarized nature of the clip)
To replace the death star hologram with the TFN logo, I took empty background from a frame where the hologram was off and motion tracked it to "cover up" the death star. To keep the background "alive" I also animated the control panel in the background to change like in the original clip, and animated a few of those flickering ray beams coming from the ceiling to crawl across the background. I then just composited on my hologram.
The other interesting thing here is that in the movie when Poggle the Lesser hands Dooku the hologram, Dooku begins talking. For this, I didn't want him to say anything until his line at the end (taken from a completely different part of the movie). So I digitally replaced his head for that shot by taking a frame where he wasn't speaking and matchmoving it to his head from the original shot. To be sure I covered all of the original head, I enlarged the replacement a little bit, so Dooku's head is 104% it's usual size in this shot.
About 15 seconds, with sound, 2.5 MB
Energy Ball 2.0 :)
An upgrade to my energy ball effect. This is a fully 2-D effect where I essentialy have a series of cloud images grow and dissapear on top of each other back to back very rapidly. An idea I wasn't sure would work, but which came out suprisingly well.
2 seconds, no sound, 216 k
I hold out my arm and create a brilliant ball of flickering energy in the palm of my hand, which I then throw into the fence behind me.
I really like how this clip turned out. It is relatively simple to do, but is none the less impressive looking. In Photoshop I used a feathered paintbrush tool set to dissolve mode to give the appearance of dozens of energy particles on every frame, then applied a glow similarly to the way I do lightsabers. For added effect, I created a fake horizontal glare, like you get when filming bright objects in real life.
About 8 seconds, no sound, 2.1 MB
See one of our wire stunts from my film Rough Day as Nolan runs, jumps into the air kicking Vic a couple of times, and drops to the ground.
For this shot I digitally removed the wires lifting Collin's character by erasing through to a shot of the empty background.
About 2 seconds, no sound, 1 MB
Check out this clip of yours truly getting hit in the face with a basketball for one of the flashback shots in Rough Day.
This clip was shot in 2 passes: One of the ball and one of myself. Essentially, I cut out the ball from it's shot and composited it onto the shot of me. I then matched it up chronologically and voila!
7 seconds, with sound, 1.3 MB
I expand a Minbari Pike and spin it around for no apparent reason.
This was just a matter of removing the pike when it wasn't expanded by erasing through to an empty background plate. I tried to reveal the pike in sections to make it look like it telescopes rather that just slides open. Since I just wanted to see if it looked good, I didn't bother going back in to fix the little mistake I didn't deal with the first time. ;)
3 seconds, no sound, 428 k
A hand places a videotape on a plate of metal and then slides an X-Ray viewer over it to reveal the unique inner workings.
This was made as a bumper (few second ad) to be inserted into the 30 by 30: Kid Flicks program, hence the logo inside the video tape. To create the X-Ray image, I actually opened a videotape and scanned it's innards before Photoshopping the heck out of it to make the words and inverted color effect.
