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.

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:

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! 

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

Flower Warfare

If you like to browse around on Youtube there is a very high chance that you have seen one of Freddiew's videos. Freddiew is a Youtube personality that comes out with short videos weekly that have high production value. He is best known for his endless number of action scenes and gunfight videos and the video below will show you why. 

 The idea of guns shooting flowers and using petals as blood is so clever and just a great concept. What is even cooler is how they managed to pull off the effect. If you watch the behind the scenes video it shows that they used a simple green screen method and layed the two videos on top of each other. It goes to show you that if you are innovative you can make a great video with the simplest of tools. Tools that are readily available to us here at the Park school.

Freddiew

I'm not sure but we might have mention freddiew before in class. For those of you who don't know who he is he makes some REALLY REALLY cool stuff. Mainly shorts with a lot of action, guns, and flashy effects. The stuff he does is amazing. Freddie has two channels on youtube. The first one is freddiew, this channel has all of the work he's done including a 3D mario video he just did and a short action movie titled claymores that he released last week. The claymores video was done with the help of a professional stunt team so you can imagine the finished product looks pretty sweet. His second channel is freddiew2. This channel is the cool one because he has behind the scenes and how to videos for almost all the videos found on the other channel. So, if your watching his stuff and wondering how he did it, you can just hop over to the other channel and watch the behind the scenes stuff. It's really interesting and really cool so if you haven't already watch every video he has ever made.