Special Effects and Fan Films

Special Effects often shine their brightest when used by passionate amateur filmmakers doing what they love. YouTuber Andrew McMurry showcased his special effects skills in his recent video, Fallout vs Skyrim. 

In his video, McMurry pits together characters from Fallout 3, a sci-fi video game, and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, a fantasy video game, in a battle to the death. The games, both products of Bethesda Game Studios, have long been in the center of debate as to which is the best RPG, and this video is the latest entry in that debate, with Fallout's guns and tech winning out over Skyrim's swords and magic.

Other than just being a fun video for video game fans, this video showcases some of the impressive effects you can pull off with the various 3D software that McMurry utilized, like After Effects and Cinema 4D. McMurry posted a video demonstrating the effects that created for his video, including dust, lightning, and glitch effects, teleportation, and a dragon.

Seeing what a skillful YouTuber can do with special effects and 3D is exciting for any aspiring artist in today's filmmaking scene.

First Impressions

Wanna know something funny? The first day I walked into class, I had no idea what After Effects even was. I'm so clueless sometimes it's a bit ridiculous. In any event, now that I know what it is, I'm extremely excited to be part of the class and learn the program. After playing around with it for just the first few days I've been trying to think about the possibilities of the program and what it could mean for my future in game design. I've worked a little with Photoshop and Illustrator, and I'm taking a class this semester that works with Flash. By the end of my time here at IC I would love to be proficient in each program to be able to adapt my drawings and sketches into polished concept art and animations.

The short time I've spent with After Effects has opened my mind up to even more than that. I'm still not decided on exactly what I want to do... I seem to have run the gambit of game design and don't know exactly where my niche is. Art, writing, and production seem to be where I find myself always returning to. But talking about all these intros to movies has made me think critically about them, and the possibility of doing something with movies or television is always in the back of my mind. One of my favorite movies of all time is 300, so when we talked about it and I began to realize that we were working with the very same program that made the special effects possible, I got very excited. I'm a pretty good artist and I really want to use my drawing skills with the After Effects program to create some cool animations like the ones in the credit scene, and I've told some friends that maybe someday I'll be able to create some cool intros for their film projects.

One of the coolest things I've seen done with the After Effects program is people on YouTube making live action, or real-life videos of games, or spoofs on them. Specifically for the game, Skyrim. This is one such video that if I could, I would love to make:

By the end of this class, I hope to have my own Skyrim Badass video on youtube. Cody, I know you're out there, lets do it.