A lot of production companies and video game development companies design their own in-house software to accommodate their needs, such as Pixar. However, even these studios use publicly accessible software such as After Effects to do things we assume were made on far fancier software.
Here is a video from Adobe's site detailing the use of After Effects as a major editing tool for the movies Iron Man 3 and Oblivion. Its cool to see how within reach the professional level methods and motion graphics are, for those of us advancing our varying levels of motion graphics abilities. (Adobe has some other great videos relating to After Effects and their other products that are worth looking through.)
Oblivion is one of those Love it/Hate it type of movies, meaning that there are things that you can really like/love about the movie, and then there are things that arent so great. To get it out of the way, the not so great thing was the story, as it came off as weak and confusing to me.
However the redeeming factor of this movie (in my opinion at least) is the visuals. Everything looked so practical and realistic, even the CG and visual effects were very photo real compared to other Hollywood movies out there.
When I watched this BTS featurette about how they accomplished the Sky Tower in the movie, I was amazed at how practical they made it. They really wanted the actors to feel like they were really in that moment, rather than trying to interact with it via Green Screen set. They accomplished this look by capturing footage of the sky and clouds that they filmed at the top of a really high volcano. And then they took that footage and front projected it onto High Res Screens on the set.
This truly was a cool and very practical thing to do. It looks more real, the light from the footage helps illuminate more light into the set, and best of all, it would save VFX artists the headache of having to deal with green screen spill in the set, because that green would bounce around everywhere I imagine, and would be a nightmare to have to key out and make as real and clean as possible.
To see the Oblivion Sky Tower Featurette, check the video out here:
As we progress through learning how to use After Effects with our name animation project in mind, I thought I would make a post about all the things you can do with After Effects with a simple text layer.
This is a video I found on YouTube. The creator did all of this using just After Effects and I thought it was very interesting.
I think it is pretty obvious that After Effects has been used in many movies for some really crazy animation and motion graphics. Just going through videos I have realized what a vast program this is and how much we can learn about it by simply practicing and trying new things on it everyday.
This video is from Adobe.com and is a short interview from the animators of Iron Man 3 and Oblivion. Just looking at the video shows how complex it can be creating an animation sequence.
Tom Cruise has a new movie coming out today called Oblivion, from Tron:Legacy director Joseph Kosinski. Much like Tron, the film relies heavily on special effects to sell its image. Included in the movie is a massive Sky Tower that is stationed in the clouds, and I found a behind the scenes video describing how they created this Sky Tower for the film. Here is the link to the video (it wouldn't let me embed the video). Pretty cool stuff.
