Where's Waldo Final Film Screening!

All our 366k class' projects are being screened, including my final project Where's Waldo. The screening is Friday, 12/12 from 6pm-8pm in studio 4D in the CMB
building on campus. It's open to the public, so come if you want, and bring friends!

final project: knife replacement

I used a black knife in this original shot and since everything is so dark, you can't even tell what it is:




So I tracked his hand and replaced the knife with a silver one. Kinda dirty, but good enough:

final project: digitally removing some legs

In one shot, a character is in the top left of the frame to the left of waldo, but in the next shot, they are back on the other side of waldo (the right side). So, I went in and digitally painted out the legs from the shot. It is a bit glitchy, and the shadows aren't perfect, but it happens so quickly that I think no one will notice.



I managed to do this by motion tracking the whole shot, pulling a few clean plate sections from various frames, overlaying them, and then matching their movement back to the original footage.



A lot of these previews are turning out really dark, where you can barely even see what I did. The final DVD or high res quicktime or whatever will look tons better.

final project: more gunshots

More gunshots, I went back and added even more lighting effects.



Of course our hero is a really bad shot, otherwise the movie would end way sooner. So there are also the missing bullet ricochets:

final project: gun shots

there are three gun shots in my project. Here's what they look like:



Of course, they have sound effects in the final version, too.

final Project: Motion Smoothing

Here is the opening shot of my movie, over which will be opening credits. It was handheld and really shaky, so it's one of a dozen or so clips that I had to smooth out in After Effects:




The edges were covered by zooming in and/or motion tile.

Of course, if I do my job right, you'll never notice these effects in the final movie. :-)

Where's Waldo Shovel Hit

I'll add before/after and more detail clips later, but here's the first two effects of the film:




First I masked Waldo so he appears from behind a tree, and then second I added in a bit of blood spatter. It's subtle. In fact, you can't really see it, the clip is too dark after transcoding it a couple of times, but I it looks great at full resolution. I'll try to render out a brighter version.

Where's Waldo Production Stills

Here are some production stills from the first weekend of shooting. They aren't really related to visual effects but they look super awesome.

Warning: These probably contain spoilers:

Where's Waldo Details

We started principal photography this weekend, shooting a carnival scene and a cemetery scene. We still have three more locations to shoot, but a majority of the effects work occurs in the already shot cemetery scene, which is where a sort of climactic final showdown occurs.

My amazing friend who came and took production stills for me also set up this website:
http://www.whereswaldofilm.com/

He will probably take care of lots of the still graphic design work (posters, dvd covers, etc) that I was planning on doing, but no worries, there are still tons of visual effects waiting to be done.

From what has been shot already, here's a breakdown of what needs to happen:

- five different gunshots, including muzzle flash, ambient lighting, and gun slide action
- close up of face as gashes open in it, possibly other "soul destroying" effects
- adding blood splatter to two seperate shovel hits to the face (50% one of these is completed already)
- masking off parts of shots so that Waldo can hide behind impossibly narrow trees (100% complete)
- tons of tracking/dolly shot stabilization

and also:
- unreasonable amounts of color correction (I won't do this until the picture is locked, probably)
- animated intro/title sequence/credits
- really sweet action trailer

It's hard to schedule everything precisely because it all depends on how the shoot goes and when we shoot and when editing happens, but I'm basically going to work on them as I get them.

Final Project Proposal

I am going to do all the post production work on my final short film that I'm making for my narrative class. It's a horror/comedy entitled "Where's Waldo." The visual effects work will include, but not be limited to, color correction, lighting effects, gun shots, blood splatters, a sweet animated title sequence, ripping apart a soul (not quite sure how I'm gonna do that one yet), image stabilization, and some other miscellaneous effects.

Assignment Nine: Particles

This easily the assignment I am most proud of on this entire blog:




just kidding.

Assignment Nine: Motion Tracking

3D Tracking test:




This didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked. The tracking was dead on in boujou but got off a bit in the process of exporting to after effects. I spent a couple of hours trying to troubleshoot.

Also, it started out five seconds but now it's apparently only three. I will definitely have to revisit this when I get more time.

Assignment Eight: Green Screen

I filmed a scene from Knocked Up in my directing workshop class, and I decided to use a green screen in the car so they didn't actually have to drive. Coincidentally, the project was also due this week, so the timing was perfect with this class!

Here's a little breakdown clip to demo what I did to the original footage, put to music so it's more interesting and also to shamelessly self-promote my band:

HD takes so long to render. Bleh.


And here's the final scene, if anyone is interested:


There are a few spots where there are some glitches, and the green screened and live action shots don't quite match, lighting-wise, but overall I'm pretty happy with it.

Here's a couple of production stills, to show just exactly how low budget this was :-)

Assignment Seven: Animate Text

Explode!



Everything looks better with sound effects added.

Created entirely from scratch in after effects. Explosion uses Particular (which is amazing, fyi.) I even did the sound design in AE, which is why it doesn't line up perfectly.

I had never actually used the text animators before, except for presets. Neat stuff, I'm hooked.

Assignment Six: 3D Layers and Camera

I took a flat background, cut it into a bunch of different layers, and put it together into 3D space. I also added a bunch more random elements that I found doing a google search for "street performers" to fill in empty space. Then I flew a camera around.

Here's the 2D street I started with:



Obviously there are still tons of glitches and bugs that should be fixed, but as it is this took over seven hours to render. The camera freaks out at the end, as well. I should go back and fix that at some point, but probably won't. Sweet!

Assignment Five: Masks, Mattes and Stencils

First results from a poorly lit homemade garage greenscreen. The shadows are pretty bad. Need to figure out a better way to make those.

Assignment Four: Utilize variable time: acceleration, deceleration, hold, etc.

I'm trying to learn some more advanced expressions, other than simple "this equals whatever this other value is" expressions. So I came up with this animation, which is controlled almost entirely with expressions.

First, the ball's movement is random using the wiggle() expression. The ball's size and color change directly related to the current speed of the ball, both of which required tweaking the math to translate the speed into the proper scale or color values.

The particles are seperate. They follow the position of the ball using simple expressions. The actual number of particles emitted per second vaires with the speed. Their velocity also matches whatever direction and speed that the ball is traveling in, which is a pretty cool effect.

By the time I finished, I had used a ton of expressions, and it's confusing to explain them, so here's a screenshot showing them all:






Also, last couple of posts have been late, but I am back on track now and all other assignments will be on time! Possibly even early!

Assignment Three: 5-10 Second Animation Using Scale and Position

I'm really not even sure what happened here. This kinda creeps me out.

Assignment Two: Assets and Elements

Assignment: bring in at least 5 images (text, paths, raster images). 3 must have alpha.

1) I found a pretty sweet picture of some guys juggling. I cut them out of the background:



Here's a larger version of just the left guy. The matte is a little dirty, but I think it will work fine with a darker background and scaled down to video size.


I left each juggler and element on it's own layer. I plan on using the puppet tool (which I've only briefly played with) in After Effects to animate these guys into some kind of creepy juggling puppet show. If I get really into it I might even try to set the bowling pins on fire.




2) Here's a quick logo I made, with alpha:

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this yet, motion-wise. I had to rasterize it to get the gradient, but I may go back to a vector version to bring into after effects, and then readd the gradient in AE to the vector.


3) A Unicorn!

Dunno what I'll do with this yet, I just found it accidentally. Probably the aforementioned jugglers will end up in front of this backdrop.


4) A nebula!

This is a pretty cool backdrop/texture.



5) A chainsaw.

I figure I'll throw this into the juggling mix to spice things up a bit. It has alpha, but I kind of cheated because the background was solid white so cutting it out was super easy.


That's all for now, I think.

Introduction: Geoff Allison

My name is Geoff. I'm a senior RTF student at UT, specializing in Directing and all kinds of film production/post production.

Here's a picture of me getting shot by a laser.

Here's what I'd look like as a pirate.

I've been using photoshop and after effects for many years, although I'm still a fairly poor graphic designer. I really love doing compositing and green screening and "photoshopping" and trying to make things look realistic.

I feel like a have a fairly solid knowledge of visual effects, so I'm kind of hoping to be able to get into more advanced things in this class, even though I know that may not be possible. I'm looking forward to learning about Illustrator and vector graphics, since I don't deal much with those. I need to get better at the design side of logos and motion graphics.

I really would love to learn how to get things to look "realistic," or like you'd see in Hollywood movies. I'm good at manipulating footage, but not creating my own elements from scratch.

I have a demo reel! It has some VFX stuff about a minute in.

I might put my resume up here someday too.