Oh, Yeah, I Haven't Posted This Yet
Because, clearly, the BIONICLE content thus far was not enough.
I actually published this around April, but felt I had to choose between this and the eye-tracking post and went with the latter. Oddly enough, this video become easily my most watched video, having surpassed 1,000 views by this point (early four times as many views as my next most-watched video and over seven times ABYDOS' view count).
I think this is the first time I actually used Photoshop on a special effects project: unlike my live action work, where I have a physical camera and can record record the wall behind my actors and actresses (if someone jumps really high in a movie, for instance, I'd have to record the empty background to get the effect correctly), Tahu essentially stays in one place during the shot, meaning I had to remove him digitally. After some initial masking work in After Effects, I ultimately took to Photoshop to manually remove him from the background; I'm feeling particularly lucky that the source, The Journey to One, used relatively stylized visuals, as this would have been far harder--and possibly above my skill level--to pull off with more realistic lighting.
In case you're wondering, here's the full image of the Region of Fire; I took two separate screenshots (with Tahu in two different poses) and used the Clone Stamp Tool to fill in the background from there:
I'd decided to remove the lava sparks to the right of Tahu, as if any of those made it to the final cut they'd look frozen in time; in the final video I ended up looping the sparks' existing footage (using a fade effect when looping works really well on this and similar items like rain). The volcano, however, was something I couldn't fix, and it still reversing its flow with Tahu's movement (although in retrospect I could probably use an optical flow effect to slow it down manually); with that said, it's moving slowly enough that I could get away with it in this scenario.
The only really challenging part after that was masking Tahu into Steve's house, as the "camera" in the Journey to One footage was actually moving. Fortunately, since it wasn't an extremely complex movement, I could keyframe and manually move the masked footage of Tahu to compensate for the original shot; unlike most of my masking work, in which I make static footage look like it's moving, here I was trying to make moving footage of the Toa appear to stay in one place. An interesting side note is that, as The Journey to One and several other CGI works try to imitate more natural and realistic camera movements, I couldn't just keyframe the beginning and end positions; there was a bit of frame-by-frame in that shot.
One may think the explosions would be somewhat advanced or challenging, but that's not really the case, as I merely used prematted stock footage and set them to wiggle with the rest of the scene. The final moments were really more about fun, though often it's the more subtle things (such as filling in a background or compensating for camera movement) that take a lot of effort. Sometimes, it's what people shouldn't notice that matters most.
And that's our post! I've updated the look of the blog to reflect my more story-based content, given that I'm preparing a major update video on ABYDOS II; progress has gone quite well on that front! With that said, I think I'm going to work on smaller-scale projects after this; I'm hoping future projects will be filmable within a weekend, leading to stories that rely on more compressed storytelling (and, of course, more frequent uploads)!
I actually published this around April, but felt I had to choose between this and the eye-tracking post and went with the latter. Oddly enough, this video become easily my most watched video, having surpassed 1,000 views by this point (early four times as many views as my next most-watched video and over seven times ABYDOS' view count).
I think this is the first time I actually used Photoshop on a special effects project: unlike my live action work, where I have a physical camera and can record record the wall behind my actors and actresses (if someone jumps really high in a movie, for instance, I'd have to record the empty background to get the effect correctly), Tahu essentially stays in one place during the shot, meaning I had to remove him digitally. After some initial masking work in After Effects, I ultimately took to Photoshop to manually remove him from the background; I'm feeling particularly lucky that the source, The Journey to One, used relatively stylized visuals, as this would have been far harder--and possibly above my skill level--to pull off with more realistic lighting.
In case you're wondering, here's the full image of the Region of Fire; I took two separate screenshots (with Tahu in two different poses) and used the Clone Stamp Tool to fill in the background from there:
I'd decided to remove the lava sparks to the right of Tahu, as if any of those made it to the final cut they'd look frozen in time; in the final video I ended up looping the sparks' existing footage (using a fade effect when looping works really well on this and similar items like rain). The volcano, however, was something I couldn't fix, and it still reversing its flow with Tahu's movement (although in retrospect I could probably use an optical flow effect to slow it down manually); with that said, it's moving slowly enough that I could get away with it in this scenario.
The only really challenging part after that was masking Tahu into Steve's house, as the "camera" in the Journey to One footage was actually moving. Fortunately, since it wasn't an extremely complex movement, I could keyframe and manually move the masked footage of Tahu to compensate for the original shot; unlike most of my masking work, in which I make static footage look like it's moving, here I was trying to make moving footage of the Toa appear to stay in one place. An interesting side note is that, as The Journey to One and several other CGI works try to imitate more natural and realistic camera movements, I couldn't just keyframe the beginning and end positions; there was a bit of frame-by-frame in that shot.
One may think the explosions would be somewhat advanced or challenging, but that's not really the case, as I merely used prematted stock footage and set them to wiggle with the rest of the scene. The final moments were really more about fun, though often it's the more subtle things (such as filling in a background or compensating for camera movement) that take a lot of effort. Sometimes, it's what people shouldn't notice that matters most.
And that's our post! I've updated the look of the blog to reflect my more story-based content, given that I'm preparing a major update video on ABYDOS II; progress has gone quite well on that front! With that said, I think I'm going to work on smaller-scale projects after this; I'm hoping future projects will be filmable within a weekend, leading to stories that rely on more compressed storytelling (and, of course, more frequent uploads)!
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