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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
