Scott Pilgrim is Possible!

This week I'm posting about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. This is a movie based on a graphic novel and because of that it incorporates a lot of graphic novel and video game elements as effects. I enjoy this movie quite a bit because of these elements and how the effect the look and feel of the movie. There's a lot of effects used to add excitement to the film by making it feel really fast paced and choppy. More importantly I feel like a lot of these effects are totally replicable with the skill set we now have in After Effects. I post a lot about effects like this, by that I mean effects we are able to replicate, but that's because I think it's really cool. Being able to look at a movie like this and say "I could do that" is pretty cool. granted it takes a lot of work to mimic anything like this but with the exception of the flaming sword I think it's all stuff that we've gone over in class. There's a lot of 2D elements layered over the video track, like the "LEVEL UP" graphic and the others like it. Those are things we could make in Photoshop or Illustrator and incorporate into  a movie with ease. I just can't believe how cool effects like this are so simple to create. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of time effect to put these things together but it's totally doable with what we know now.

Green Screen

So for our next project we are placing ourselves in a movie or video that we get to choose.  I found this guy on youtube and i thought these videos were pretty cool.  In the first one, most of the images are static and you can see how he cut the picture into layers to place himself inside the city.  The first video also has him waling through a field of butterflies, and you can tell he created all the shadows to look real.

After watching the second video you can tell how much better he has gotten from doing tutorials.  He did an excellent job with the lighting.  Without the lighting, i do not think the meteor scene would look real.

keep watching and reading tutorials and in no time, you'll be a pro.

Project One

I was looking through some tutorials that I might be using in my first project (explosions and turning photos from 2D into 3D). I found some that I think would be very useful. The first one doesn't tell you how to create an explosion but it includes a zip file that you can just import into your project and it tells you how to size it up and place it where it will fit best.

This video copilot tutorial (that someone may have posted before) shows how to layer photos to make them seem like they are in 3D. I was hoping to create the credits for the actors in the movie by taking images of them and creating a 3D image from the 2D stills. Here is another tutorial on how to do this, I didn't watch through the whole thing but it seems like an alternate way to create this using displacement maps.

Another thing I wanted to try (hopefully not adding too much work for myself) would be to create shapes in Photoshop and then animate them in after effects. Since it is a war movie, I wanted to use these shapes when I bring out the title (show the title of the film and then have them either drop down). I've made more then one storyboard so I just have to decide which one to use. Either having solid colored parachutes drop down or maybe creating a gun from a template and having the title come from that.