Forrest Gump: The Animated Movie

Forrest Gump is quite the movie. Not only is it lovely story-wise, it features some pretty amazing CGI, from leg removal to ping pong ball addition and beyond. The quality of work in this movie was impressive in 1994 and continues to be amazing.

This video goes into the making of the ever-famous, super deep Feather Scene. The scene itself is often considered the ultimate metaphor for the whole movie, channeling the idea of “wherever the wind blows.” Funnily enough, the wind of this scene was completely choreographed. The graphics people working on Forrest Gump were able to composite a blue-screen video of someone controlling the flutter of the feather onto the exiting scene and meshing it to an actual feather that Forrest interacts with in the scene. Everything had to be planned and thought out extremely thoroughly for the scene to work. And boy did it work.

Another really cool part of Forrest Gump is whenever Forrest shows up in historical footage—meeting JFK, sitting with John Lennon. The behind the scenes video shows how much matching, masking, augmenting, and altering went in to realistically putting Tom Hanks in the scene. These scenes really show the magic of the green (or in this case blue) screen. Forrest Gump is quite the testament to CGI and animation in a movie that might not be immediately associated with animation.

It Just Feels Good At First

Train came out with their new music video for their song "Feels Good At First".  This music video features a very cool effect where you watch the video in a silhouette of Pat's head.  As well as this, the music video plays a lot with transparency to help create the idea of reminiscing on memories.

If I had to guess how they created the effect of playing the music video in the silhouette of Pat's head, I would say that they masked his head and took out Pat's face.  They then inserted the music video into where Pat's head was.  But if you look closely, there is the rest of the image in Pat's head on the outside of the silhouette, just with a higher opacity.  This could be done through using Mocha to track and then mask Pat's head.  It's a simple technique with a creative and powerful image.

Kroll Show Title Sequence

Kroll Show Skit

    Last year, during my mass media research methods class, we had the opportunity to talk to a writer that worked on Portlandia, Arrested Development, and Comedy Central's Kroll Show. Our class watched the Kroll Show pilot before it was aired and the one part that stuck out was the animated intro sequence. Famous icons, fonts, and titles are recreated to say Kroll show and flashes quickly with the electronic music. This intro seems simplistic but graphic artists must've photoshopped each individual font and put it in the necessary background. The last Kroll Show title with the explosion in the city seems fairly easy to recreate. The only question I have about this sequence is how did Comedy Central get away with using all the fonts and titles from famous shows and games. I would think that there would be some type of copyright lawsuit of sorts. The show is quite funny but like many sketch comedies, it's either hit or miss and not all skits are funny.

-MCH


*The title sequence wasn't a choice on the blog youtube search but here is the link.
KROLL SHOW INTRO

green screen tips

I have been affixed on green screen discussion and videos lately, probably because of our project -- next will I will try to change it up!! anyway ... this week I have decided to post some helpful tips about effectively and correctly keying, masking, and tracking green screen-ed footage


there really isn't that much to say about these videos / tutorials, there are so many others out there-- I just picked these ones because they looked worthwhile!!

I wish I watched some of this guys' tutorials before working AE ... he is  simple and to the point, yet very sufficient
http://vimeo.com/33159581

this tutorial is quite helpful with initially keying the object ... especially if there was "bad" footage -- bad lighting, or random taped colors, or wrinkled screen, or whatever!

Day & Night

I've been really interested in masking lately because we do it a lot in class and I'm planning to do some for my project. I started to think about some good examples of masking that I could study and I remembered this one short from Pixar called Day and Night. It's actually one of my favorite Pixar shorts because I find the premise really touching and well done. The short makes fantastic use of 2D hand-drawn animation to mask 3D animated scenes. I actually feel this is something that could be relatively easy to do as well, at least in regards to using 2D animations to mask other things. Check out the short below plus a fun how-they-did-it video.

Masking Tips

The concept of masking in photoshop is still difficult for a lot of us so I found some websites that have tips and show multiple ways to mask a photo.

This first site explains different tools one can use to make your selection in photoshop. The first technique is using the magic wand tool which can help you make selections of areas with a limited color range. It’s the tool to use when the object you want to isolate is cleanly defined against an unvarying background, such as the surface of a table or a cloudless sky." the second technique is using the lasso tool, which lets you create a selection by drawing a line around the object. And the third technique is using the brush tool, which you can use while in quick mask mode.

This next site explains a lot of the same techniques but also talks about using the magic eraser tool, which allows you to erase pixels that are all the same color (or are a similar color). For example, if you used the Magic Eraser tool at its strictest setting, and clicked on a part of the picture that was orange, every other pixel in the picture of that exact shade of orange would be erased.