Five*5

Worked through the Particle Shadows tutorial over at VideoCopilot. I figured that it could provide one approach to creating the shadows for the  INNER's in an efficient way. I'm right, but it will take tweaking. It was a reasonably quick tutorial to get the basics of the technique down-pat but it took a fair while to play with the details so that I could achieve the right volume to the shadows.

This was the raw result of the base tutorial. The objects cast the shadows correctly and according to plan, but there were issues with some of the shadows being to close to the ground in the sense that they were far to dark in comparison to what they should (in reality) be. I played with the settings further and improved on the issue but it was by no way resolved. I kept going and it frustratingly refused to improve to any degree that I would deem acceptable. Then I had a thought, which was something that I should have thought of at the beginning;

Yep. The objects had collided/passed through the floor plane which had created said abomination. So very frustrating that I had not thought to check earlier - I would have saved myself some serious time. But we learn from these mistakes. When creating the emitter I had tested and checked it thoroughly but forgot to recheck when continuing with the tutorial, when I made changes to the emitter. So I tweaked the settings on the emitter and moved the emitter higher and you can see comparison to a couple of attempts and the final attempt in the following video. The shadows aren't dark enough in my opinion, but I think that has more to do with the render than anything..

Five*2

Audio-driven Particles from Dane Kirkland on Vimeo.

Testing out AE Particular as well as experimenting with audio driven animation.

I've been itching to get into Particular for ages now and so I've been playing around with it's various looks and functions. There was one video that I stumbled across which particularly (pun intended!) inspired me to have a closer look at the more complicated applications of the plugin;

let yourself feel. from Esteban Diácono on Vimeo.

Isn't it beautiful? And at the same time soooo ridiculous?? That's what I thought. As you can see my attempt is not nearly as grand. The basis of the technique is not all that difficult, but understanding how the movement is driven and applying the various effects to create a look better than brightly coloured sand takes a fair bit of time, effort and research! A fantastic resources to get you started that I would highly recommend would be the tutorial at RGTV that I used. I am yet to attempt it with my own music, but that's coming! As is attempting it with sound fx.

But as far as a look that I like from a first attempt I like to think that it was pretty decent. The example was actually far longer, but the epic rendering times (even on my shiny quad core imac!) were extravagant - so I've restricted it to 8 seconds. I've thought about applications for this within my MAP work. My current thought so far is that it could be incorporated into the 'monster train' - the idea of having 'smoke' coming from it's nostrils, or even 'sparks' coming from the tracks that pulse with the sound of the train tracks clacking along would be great! You know the chooga-chooga-chooga part of the movement of the train? That part.

In my head it looks good anyway.

Five*1

Bridge Comp Test base track from Dane Kirkland on Vimeo.

Bridge Comp Test 1 from Dane Kirkland on Vimeo.

Bridge Comp Test 2 from Dane Kirkland on Vimeo.

AE Motion tracking WIP.

Exploring motion tracking in After Effects. The base unaltered track that it gave is the top video. As far as a stable track it was rubbish, but that's to be expected when you haven't tweaked the settings what-so-ever. Mind you, it kept it in the general area of the tracking point reasonably ok-ish so that was enough for me to work from. I linked the position of the comped character through the use of an expression to link it with the tracking data. That way when I changed the track layer the character's position would be automatically updated. Sure I could have copy and pasted the relevant data but this was just far more efficient.

The second video is a more refined track, but as you can see it still slips here and there, particularly with the larger camera movements.

The final video is that same track again, tweaked further - with touch up's done by hand. It was a bit painstaking to do it this way but still worked out pretty well. It's still not perfect, I'm going to continue to play with it to see if I can get it perfect - but this isn't too bad as far as it goes I don't think.

I have done a few other tests which I will upload as well, but this was the best one for this particular example. So after this little exercise I've realised that the challenge of tracking into unstable footage for the length of time planned and the complexity of what I will be doing would be... well suicide. I'm pretty sure it would be doable, but would not look as good as it would if it were stable footage. There will still be some handheld footage in the film, but the rest will be shot on a tripod and manipulated into appear as though it is handheld. I've thought of a few different ideas on how to approach this (keying, plugins etc) I think the route I will explore further is using handheld footage as a direct base for simluating the movement. Using the same technique that I did in the examples above and applying the tracked movement to a stable piece of footage. I'm yet to shoot any stable test footage but I've quickly mocked up an example using the movement of the footage above on a still image. I think as long as the footage which is to be used is of a higher res than the final export it should work. Tests will confirm this of course and it may mean double shooting everything that I want as handheld, but that's alot less time-consuming than the alternative. If not, I'll use a mixture of the techniques. (Video eg follows, ran out of my daily vimeo quota =p)