More Helpful Tutorial Sites

As Arturo mentioned in class, Video Copilot and Lynda.com are great sites to help you get more comfortable in After Effects. I'd like to add on to that and give you all links to the YouTubers that I learned from. Go check them out and follow the tutorials that interest you.

Mt. Mograph - Creates really neat and minimalistic After Effects projects. Really simple and quick to follow, plus you'll have something at the end to show for your hard work.

Ch-Ch-Check It - These guys stopped uploading in the last few months, but they've uploaded tutorials regarding After Effects and Photoshop in the past. They have similar attitudes to Andrew Kramer of Video Copilot and they're just really cool guys.

VinhSon Nguyen - This guy is one of the harder YouTubers to follow, especially recently, but I'm sure you can find some tutorials to either follow along to or get inspiration from.

VFX Bro - The VFX Bro is the other half of FinalCutKing (if you've ever seen his vines). VFX Bro goes more into the behind the scenes of the effects.

Howard Pinsky - Howard Pinsky, maybe better known as Ice Flow Studios in years past, has a bunch of Photoshop tutorials, which can really help you out in After Effects.

Sam and Niko - Sam and Niko are best known online as CorridorDigital, an entrepreneurial filmmaking studio out in LA. These guys have been making videos forever and this is their behind the scenes channel. You'll find so many tutorials on how they do their effects, plus they're really chill.

BrandonJLa - Brandon Laatsch, the other half of FreddieW before they disbanded last year, posted all the behind the scenes videos for them including the After Effects tutorials that got me into it.

TrooperFX - Ok so this guy doesn't post tutorials, but his motion graphics are incredibly inspirational.

AcrezHD - Acrez used to post videos, I don't think he has in a while, but he's a great tutorial channel that you should definitely check out.

Hexjibber - Hexjibber is a bridge between After Effects and Flash and if you're really into Flash animation or just Anime style animation, this is the guy to check out.

Learning 3D in Maya and Max

3D modeling and animation is something that I really wish. We have learned a bit of Maya in class, but I wish we could have taken more time to really go in depth with the program and make more 3D animations using it. But thanks to this class I have scratched the surface of Maya, and I am planning as a personal project to learn as much about it as I can to take my VFX to the next level.

But besides Maya, there is another program that I have been desiring to learn and try: 3Ds Max. Its another program very similar to Maya (they both come from Autodesk). And in some ways, I feel like I know how to use this program, and I haven't even used it yet. 

I think the reason for this bold claim is because I watched this particular mini series on YouTube from BrandonJLA about learning 3Ds Max. Brandon is famous for being the 2nd in command to Freddie Wong on YouTube back in the early 2010s. They post a lot of cool videos that have a lot of VFX and 3D animations. The programs that they use to make their videos are After Effects and 3Ds Max. Both of these programs are very comment among YouTube and Independent filmmakers. But like any 3D program, many have found it intimidating to learn 3Ds Max. So Brandon takes the audience through the program, how to use it, how he learned it, and some of the pitfalls of 3Ds Max.

I've watched this series of videos a few times, and somehow I feel like I really understand 3Ds Max on at least a basic level. But I just find it humorous that I feel like I know it, and yet I haven't even used it yet. But I am planning to very soon. 

The only problem is that 3Ds Max is exclusively on PC. You cannot download it for Mac (unless you dual boot your Mac to run a Windows operating system, but that process can be very annoying). And as a Mac user, thats kind of annoying, especially when Maya can be used on both Mac and PC (which is ironic since both programs come from the same company). But hopefully I can dowload it on my familys PC back home (if the specs are at least the minimum that I need to operate it).

But that is a project that I plan to do over the break: learn more about and practice 3D in 3Ds Max and Maya.

If you want to learn 3Ds Max in the future, I highly recommend watching this mini series from Brandon: 

    

Rocking Out On a Moving Car

Today I wanted to share a video which I think I'll always remember. Nearly 6 years ago, Freddiew released the following video:

I can still remember opening YouTube one day, and seeing this video on the front page. I watched it, and was genuinely confused. Was this fake? But it looked so real! At this point Freddiew still hadn't become the massive viral success that they are today. The comment section was divided as to if it were real. After some research, I found it to be fake, but it inspired me so much. How they could trick people into legitimately thinking it was real. Since then, I followed the channel religiously - just like every other aspiring 14 year old VFX artist.

6 years later, and the team have gone through many viral hits and many changes. Freddie and Brandon (who ran the channel), have gone their separate ways to a degree, but it's been exciting to follow their journey. I'll still get immense joy to this day, going back through their old videos which gave me so much inspiration when I was younger.

And in case you were wondering, here's how they pulled off that shot:

CG is (Not) Ruining Movies

I recently saw this video by the fine folks at RocketJump Film School (or Freddie Wong as some YouTubers might know him by) about using CG elements in films. A lot of people have said (and still do) that CG in live action movies just looks bad, and how it is better to shoot things practically (as in for real, captured in camera). But is this true?

In some aspects, yes CG doesn't always look great; it may look too animated or glossy and doesn't blend well. But that doesn't mean it's bad altogether. As Freddie points out in this video, the main reason we probably see bad CG and VFX is because the movies themselves are just bad altogether. But there are several movies that use VFX very effectively and people dont even realize it being CG elements. Things like adding cars to streets in a chase scene for example, majority of the cars in the scene are not real cars. They are CG cars that were rendered and utilized correctly in order to add to the story.

I think that the main point that Freddie is trying to make is that CG is simply a tool, a tool that is used to help enhance the story that a filmmaker is trying to tell. If that story is not good, then many other elements will start to look bad as well. The effects will call attention to themselves because the audience is not engaged enough in the story.

So in the end, what matters the most is having a wonderful story to tell to an audience, once you know you have a great story, use the tools you have at your disposal effectively; use the right mix of practical and visual effects in order to help tell your story and make it more engaging and more believable for your audience.

While thinking of some movies and television shows to rotoscope myself into, I took some time to look for some examples and inspirations. This is Freddie Wong's spoof trailer of "Twilight: Eclipse". I found that he did a great job of fitting himself into the negative spaces of the film as well as weaving in some funny one liners between the characters conversations. Even the scene where he puts himself in the same bed as Bella and Edward, he did a pretty good job of editing himself in there. Not to say that there weren't some quirks to the video. At certain parts I could see the green screen feathering around Freddie, and at other parts you could tell that the lighting he used really put him out of place, but this is ten times better than what I will probably do.

I also watched Ellen DeGeneres' skit of the same idea. Although hers had a lot more practical effects, like rebuilding similar sets, but I think her editor did just as well! 

Video Game High School - RPG & Opening

(NOTE: For the purposes of this post, only watch the first 2 minutes and 30 seconds of this video.)

Video Game High School, a fantastic Kickstarter-funded series by Freddie Wong, depicts a world where there is a high school... where you play video games. That is legitimately all you do. A whole world was created for this purpose, with the high school's classes ranging from "Sniping 101" to "Advanced Kart Racing". All-in-all, the world is pretty believable, all the way down to the pizza-in-a-can-from-a-vending-machine.

In this first episode from the second season, the show opens to the main characters having a bit of an adventure in an RPG, "questing". A couple of the characters fire off their own versions of attacks, all of which have a bit of After Effecting done to them. One character pulls out a lute, playing a melody which travels all the way to the girl, who is an archer. She then looses her arrow, the camera following it in slow motion all the way to the attacking brute, freezing him and allowing him to be shattered into hundreds of block-like pieces.

As for the opening, it's all quick titles and transitions set to music, but it's all very smooth and pleasant, both to look at and listen to. Freddie Wong and his colleagues did a fantastic job on this series, and it shows.

Freddie Wong Tack Bell commercial

I found this video on youtube the other day, freddie wong is one of my favorite modern vfx artists. He makes plenty of funny videos using techniques and programs that anyone could learn. Often aside from his original video posting page, he maintains an alternate page where he posts inside looks on his videos. I chose this video because I found it entertaining and it contained some simple yet amusing video effects to create the taco. While the mini taco bell prop may have been real, its obvious that the taco that was made on the inside was not. He must have and to track the camera movements in order for the 3d taco to look like it was indeed placed within the mini taco bell prop. And it probably took some time to create the actual digital taco that was made from the lasers. Anyway heres the video, hope you enjoy it.

Freddie Wong simple skit

While this video is simply a short comedy skit, it does feature some hints of motion graphics that I thought were good enough to post on this blog. Some examples of graphics added to this particular video are the lasers on the guns, the drone in the sky and the masks that each of the characters take off. The masks, while only being a short segment of the entire scene were interesting to me as they had to map the persons face to the mask mesh that was to be taken off. There is evidence of tracking in this video as well, the laser on the sniper rifle clearly was added during post production. They must have tracked the gun footage and then added that laser to the bottom of it. And obviously the end gunshots and city scape were both computer generated as the wizard city titles came into view. Overall a funny video, this shows that effects like gunshots and such don't need to be over the top to add to the existing footage and make a simple story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHQr0HCIN2w