Final Project/Final Post

Let me start by saying this has been a really great class. I never really pictured myself doing visual effects stuff, but I really enjoyed learning it and experimenting. Thanks to Ben, Maru, and everyone in class.

Here is my final project. Many complications, but I think it turned out well overall. A few things that never worked quite right... I couldn't get the tornado to work properly in 3D space by actually moving the emitter. I wanted to do this so that the tornado would twist and bend in a natural way, but I was only able to move the entire layer. Also, I wanted to have a layer exploder particle layer on the barn, but this didn't work either. Well, actually, I don't know if it worked. I made this layer, but could not watch it. The ram preview took 10 min to load less than 2 seconds of it - even on 1/3 resolution. I tried to export it all so I could see it and then tweak it, but after several failed exports, I had to turn the layer off, as I was worried it was not going to work and didn't have time to do another export.

Why this is so late: I was expecting a long render, but I was not expecting a 13 hour render. I started the render the first time on Thursday night, left it running over night, only to come back the next morning to discover that the server had filled up mid-render, and so it did not complete. I started the export again immediately, it took until after the labs closed Friday night. I tried to go in first thing this morning to get it, but all the labs were closed until noon. I got it as soon as they opened, and finished the audio.

Here is the final product.

Tornado Alley from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Thanks again to all of you. It was a great class.

Ryan

Final Project: Third Week

Still behind this week. I blame it on having my last two final exams ever tomorrow. After Thursday, I'm expecting some dramatic accomplishments on this project. Some work that was done this week...

I've started working on importing the tornado into my footage and plotting it's path. I thought that I could motion sketch the path, but when I converted the patch from 2d to 3d, it went a little crazy (y and z values were all over the place, only the x value was actually relevant to my sketch) and was unusable. Which means I have to painstakingly plot each point of the tornado's path, but i have experimented with the motion tracking of the emitters, and it looks pretty cool.

Also been working on the destruction of the barn. This will take several layers. One layer will be the actual barn, which has a mask that wipes over it (to erase the barn as it is destroyed). The other layers will use the exploder from Particle Playground to take the image of the barn and shatter it up into the tornado. Looks like a good start so far. The next step is to get shapes (splintered board and such) for the particles to form to, so the barn doesn't look like it is just braking apart into perfect little squares.

Video to be added to this post soon to illustrate what I'm talking about, but again, not till after Thursday.

Final Project: Week 2

week two of the final project and, sadly, I am already a little behind schedule. the beginning of the shot is laid out in 3d. several layers went into this so far...

lightning video
5 layers of cloud/sky
2 particle layer of sky to get a nice overall cloudiness
two layers of mountains
three layers of ground to separate for depth

i'm pretty happy with it thus far, its rough, but going good places i think.

Tornado Alley - Week 2 from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Final Project Plan

Proposal:

My final project is an expansion of my particle tornado. The basic plan is to create a scene of the tornado tearing through a field and destroying a farm house.

The shot will begin in the sky with swirling clouds and lightning flashes, then crane down into a field where a windmill/weather vein type thing will be spinning wildly. The camera will pull back and the tornado will become visible. It will move across the field, hopefully tearing up a fence along the way, and culminating in the destruction of a farm house.

I want to combine several different styles and elements in this clip. The lightning sky will be actual video footage, mixed in with still images for the field and farm. Particles for the tornado and some sky elements. I'm going to steal some of the clouds from my kite project to add to the sky. I also want to find some audio from an actual tornado incident caught on tape to be the soundtrack for the shot.

My goals for this project are to integrate several elements After Effects uses into one cohesive and visually unique clip.


Assets:

I have a lot of the elements already...

Particle Tornado:


Tornado from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

The lightning video:


Lightning video from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

The clouds from the kite project:

Kite Flight Part 2 from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Field, Fence, and Farmhouse images:



















































I still need to find the audio for the project and the image for the weather vein.


Schedule:

Week 1: In my first week I have laid out the project, collected the majority of my assets, and started separating layers of the backgrounds so that they can be put into 3D and alias with the camera movement.

Week 2: My goal this week is to finish separating the backgrounds into layers, color correcting them, and doing a basic sketch of the camera movement with the integrated background layers.

Week 3: My goal this week is to add in the main animated elements: the tornado, the weather vein, the fence, and the farmhouse.

Week 4: This week I will finish the project by polishing the animations and camera movement, and finally adding the audio.

Green Screen Project

I had quite a few problems with this assignment.  I thought that most of the issues were going to come from the yellow shirt, but that actually keyed much better than I expected.  The two problem areas were my hair, which had a lot of little spaces of green showing through, as well as some spill, and my waving hands, which with the space between fingers and and the motion blur were quite a pain.  I couldn't get either of these features fixed very well.  I tried doing some color correction pre-keying to separate the green screen from the subject a little bit better, to minimal success.  I played around with the matte choker and such, also with little avail.  In the end, I actually ended up keying the same clip twice, once to focus on the hands best, the other to focus on the hair best, then laid them over each other.  The effect still looks pretty terrible, but I wasn't sure what else to do with it.


Waving to Crowd from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Car Stabilization

Here is some random shakey footage that I happened to have.  I did two points to stabilize position and rotation, one on the interior light overhead, and the other on the glowing radio.  The tracker lost them a few times, but worked fairly well.  The video looks a little weird because of some strange interlacing issues this clip has, but the stabilizer was pretty effective.

Original Footage:


Car Raw from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Stabilized Footage:


Car Stabilized from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Particle Tornado

Here is my particle tornado. It's made from five layers: 1. Faded spheres to form the main part. 2. Tiny polygon particles for debris in the tornado. 3. More faded spheres for the core of the tornado. 4. Yet more faded spheres for the dust kicked up at the base. 5. More polygons for the debris at the base.

That's all really.



Tornado from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Chicken Text

A little wisdom from Tyler Durden.


Text Animation from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

3D Field

Here is my first 3D project.  It actually ended up not looking so incredibly '3D', but each cloud, as well as the trees and two sections of grass, are on a separate z axis.


3D Field from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Wishing Well Teaser

This is a teaser for a short film that I wrote and directed for advanced digital narrative last year. It's a pretty simple text stencil, I just animated it.


Wishing Well Teaser from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Kite Flight Part 2

For this project I added on to my kite animation.  I used the ease tools to start and stop the clouds, as well as to smooth some of the kite tail animation.  I also used used the graph view to control the falling and rotation of the kite body.

Enjoy.

Kite Flight Part 2 from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Kite Flight Animation

Hopefully that worked.  Never posted video online before.

This is my animation, pretty simple but I think it turned out well.  I animated the kite body to scale back as it moved, then added a little random rotation and bending of the corners to make it a little more life-like.  Then I parented the tails to the body and stuck the pins in them so I could twist them around a bit.  At first I tried to animate the tails before sticking them to the kite, which worked, but it looked weird because they were moving independently of the kite, so I ended up reanimating them once they were attached.  The clouds were done in a couple different levels at different speeds to make the sky look a little deeper.

Kite Flight from Ryan Kirk on Vimeo.

Portrait Graffiti

Portrait Graffiti.

The other night one of my friends drew a sketch of me. Blue sharpie on paper. I tried to take a picture of myself that matched the sketch. It turned into this - don't ask me how.

First Post

Here is my first assignment for this class, and my first ever blog posting. About myself.... My name is Ryan Kirk. I'm an RTF major and this is my first foray into visual effects and motion graphics. I suppose the closest I've come is doing color correction and basic green screen effects for my student films, but I'm looking forward to learning this stuff. My main interest as far as career goes is in writing for television. Spare time: I enjoy music, playing and listening. I lead worship for children at the Austin Stone Community Church, and my roommate and I are currently working on a sci-fi concept album, it's mostly mellow acoustic jams. I recently decided that the red panda is my favorite animal. I think that's all you need to know about me for now.