Posts Tagged ‘visual effects’

Daylight, BAD!

UPDATE: Here’s a few frames from the Vampire 5k promotion video I’m working on, after sky replacement, motion-tracking and color correction:

This weekend is all about blotting out the sun. Working on a promotional video for the Vampire 5k, a themed fun-run where participants assume the role of vampires, or human “citizens” in a 5 kilometer event that’s part traditional run, part flag football, part Halloween, and part cosplay.

Nearly all the footage I shot was filmed during the day, so I’ll be going through all the selects, and employing  heavy color-correction to turn them into night scenes. In most instances, I’ll also be motion-tracking the shot, masking out actors and foreground elements, and replacing the day-lit skies in the background with nice, dark, starry ones. It’s a lot of work, but so far, the results have been well worth it.

‘Tis The Season… For Vampires?

(There’s one or two issues with the motion-tracking for the “cat” eyes, but I’m pleased with how this is coming together, so far.)

I completed the first day of shooting, and started working on a few visual-effects ideas for a promotional video I’ll be making for the Vampire 5K– a casual marathon with a vampire theme that will be hosted in Denver this spring (and later, nationally). Participants are encouraged to sign up in teams — either as vampires, or humans — and will be pitted against each other in friendly competition. A portion of the proceeds will go to benefit local blood donation center. Of course.

In order to give all the outdoor chase scenes between vampires and their victims– “citizens”, as the race organizers have dubbed them — I’ve been shooting with an unusually high shutter speed of 1/1000 at 24 frames-per-second. This eliminates almost all motion blur, and gives the footage a really staccato, frenetic look that I think will work really well with the marathon’s theme of hunter-and-hunted.

The project has a fairly tight budget, so I’ll have to keep a close eye on how much time I spend in post-production, but I wanted to put together something really fun and entertaining for my client. It’s not difficult to imagine wanting to get a little carried away with this one. It’s vampires! How can I NOT?

One of several challenges for the video is that practicality called for us to shoot during the day– which means I’ll be doing quite a bit of heavy color-correction and keying in post to make all the footage look as though it were shot at night. Similarly, I’ll be doing a fair share of effects work on the vampire beauty shots as well; adding fangs and spooky eyes, as well as some digital facial prosthetics.

As you can see from the video above, there’s a decent amount of work to be done for each shot, but I’m really looking forward to it. Should be fun!

A couple years ago, I got to design a suite of streaming interfaces for a tie in between V-Moda headphones and HBO’s hit vampire series, True Blood, and I really enjoyed it, so I’m very excited to get to visit the genre again.

Oh– and just so we’re clear. There will be no sparkling, daylight-walking, greasy-haired sissy vampires in this video. Sorry to disappoint you Twilight fans.

Something Is Terribly Wrong With Me.

I’ve never been sure what to do with these goofy things, so against all better judgment, I thought I’d post them here. It’s just a couple of experiments with green-screen work, effects compositing, and 3D animation.

I wanted to try my hand at a few visual effects, and I’ve long harbored a deep, shameful fixation with Star Wars, so I thought it’d be good practice to try emulating a film that I’m familiar with. Woefully, embarrassingly familiar with.

Yes, that’s a real guy, in a real Stormtrooper costume  …   Don’t ask.

Most likely, this junk will probably continue to gather dust on my hard-drive, but I sure  had fun making it, painfully nerdy though it may be.

And here’s a few more screenshots, showing some work compositing mattes for background plates.

And one last one, showing some modeling in Cinema 4D.  My geekdom knows no bounds.