The Chickening.

I would like to share a video I found by a motion graphics artist named Nick DenBoer. He has done graphics professionally for a variety of known companies such as Conan, DC, and more. As far as I'm aware, he does much of his stuff in After Effects. As you will see a lot of it is very strange but extremely impressive in my opinion. The video below is a short film/trailer that is going to Sundance and several other festivals. It is called The Chickening. It uses clips entirely from the movie The Shining, but with many, many things added, from face replacements to all kinds of background objects. In this class, I hope to be able to enhance my abilities to anything near this level, and probably to a less disturbing degree. Without further a'do, The Chickening. I'm sorry.

As you can see, his ability to motion track and pretty much seamlessly add objects to a previously shot 2D scene is extremely impressive. I have done work like this in the past but nowhere near as complex on shots that moved as much as these. I look forward to extending my knowledge of After Effects and Mocha motion tracking as well as other similar plugins and programs. Check out his reel if you wish, and here is his YouTube channel.

Tracking in Mocha with Mary Poplin

So for my green screen project, I have a few shots where I need to use tracking in order to sell the effect that I am trying to pull off. But for some reason I've been getting very strange results when I track in Mocha. Some of the tracking ends up looking a bit jittery, which wont translate very well when trying to pull of my visual effects.

I've recently been watching videos about using mocha and how to get the best results with difficult shots. I've found that if you want to learn more about mocha tracking, a good resource is from someone who actually works for Imagineers Systems (creators of mocha): Mary Poplin.

Mary is a pro VFX artist/tracker/roto painter. I've watched 2 videos so far where she goes through how to get a good track in Mocha to get good clean results in order to roto paint onto a clip of a couple short films. I found her through the Film Riot community because she has worked with them on 2 short films both of which involve rotoscoping and painting things out of shots by using Mocha. She does go through the shots pretty quickly in her tutorials, but You can still learn a lot from her.

So now I'm going to see how I can use what I learned from her and apply it to my tracking in my green screen project and see if I can get any better results then before.

If you want to check 2 of her videos, they post right below:

More Fun With Rotoscoping

So I was playing around in Mocha/After Effects once again with some rotoscoping for our latest project, and was finding myself forgetful on some of the basics when it comes to the craft. So I went to youtube and found this cool tutorial to get my mind back in the effects mode as Spring Break winds down:

I like some of the mattes/filters they apply throughout as well, and as always it helped to gather a bit more experience as this can be really tedious and tricky at times.

The 2011 Oscars and how it relates to our next project

In the spirit of our latest project assignment, I recalled the opening to the 2011 Academy Awards. The show was hosted by Anne Hathaway and James Franco, and the opening to the show was a montage of movie clips from that year with the two hosts cut into the scenes for comedic effect. Not only was it pretty much exactly what we are doing now, but it is quite funny and incredibly well done. Check it out:

And for all we know, maybe they used Mocha as well :).

iWatch

This video I very cool actually.  To start, the concept of a holographic watch is a wicked cool concept.  Secondly, the execution of making this concept into a video was done very professionally.  We can see that the author(s) is (are) of college age and are very knowledgable and skilled with video making and animation.  The best part of this whole thing though, is that they used mocha to do this.  Not only do they show you what they are doing, but they also allow you to follow along.  For not being a tutorial, I feel that there was a good balance of showing you what they did and how they did it.  I would love to be able to apply this kind of stuff in my work.  

Mocha and Tablets

On Thursday when we worked with Mocha, I had a bit of trouble in my clip with some tracking. I had a clip of a mobile device and there was a lot of activity around it so the program did not track perfectly. I found this on the internet and even though it was designed for CS5 it still seems to be decently effective. I've still got some work to do on the project file I started, but it was definitely a step in the right direction. Video is below:

ProCreate & iPad

I stumbled upon this one day and i thought it was awesome.  It was mostly made on the iPad, taking four months to finally finish it.  It was created on an application called ProCreate, along with using Adobe After Effects and mocha.  I really like how it transforms from shot to shot showing the brush strokes of the "paint."  it amazes me that most of this was created on an iPad.

you can watch here how they made it.

Motion Tracking

I came across this video a couple of days ago and thought it was really cool. It's a couple of guys who are playing around with a picture frame that looks like it's taking pictures and then the pictures come to life. They were inspired by the opening from Modern Family. The effect is difficult to explain unless you've seen it, so here's the video. It's pretty awesome.


Frame of Mind from Steven Alan on Vimeo.


I wasn't sure how they made the video, and then I saw one of the guys uploaded a tutorial explaining how  he did it. He used After Effects and Mocha to track the inside of the frame, and then put the image that he wanted into the frame digitally. He says it wasn't difficult, just extremely repetitive. Here's the tutorial video as well, although it is a little bit long.


"Frame of Mind" Tutorial from Ben Boutwell on Vimeo.

Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films. Originally, recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is called a rotoscope, although this device has been replaced by computers in recent years. In the visual effects industry, the term rotoscoping refers to the technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate so it may be composited over another background. Some of the top rotoscoping software includes after effects and mocha.

An example of rotoscoping everyone might recognize include the scenes from Forrest Gump. Rotoscoping was used to integrate Forrest into footage of famous events.

Here is a tutorial from the adobe website that utilizes after effects and photoshop together.



I also found tutorials from Creative Cow and forgingfire.com. 

Link to Mocha Download

The current download version here is 2.6.1. The one I have is 2.2 and the one Arturo has (I think) is 2.3, so it looks like the most recent download that Imagineering has is newer than both. I haven't tried downloading it yet, so I don't know if it will actually work, but we'll see.

Face replacement

This is a funny video using MOCHA as a face replacement tool.

The tutorial for it is HERE

And HERE are 28 MOCHA tutorials, including THIS ONE for those of you that have the older version of the program,