TSTV Graphic/Slate

All of this was composed in after effects except for the TSTV logo.

The background is just 2 layers. The floor was put in 3D and rotated on the Z axis. I put the TSTV logo and background in, then made a reflection of both layers after I changed the point of of interest to help me rotate and flop it. I skewed the image to help adjust the perspective and make it seem attached to the floor with the four corner pin. I had problems with this until I turned off constrain proportions. I added a fast blur to both reflection.

The light was kind of tricky. for the spot light effect instead of a spot, I used a trapezoid mask above the logo and dropped the opacity to 20%. I had to stretch the trapezoid up after I added the camera. I also repeated the edge pixels to soften it up a little. The light itself is just a point, with a few adjustments to the default settings. I wiggled the light 30 times per second with 30% intensity to give it a nice soft flicker.

For the particles I just used CC Particle world with faded sphere. Adjusted the color, birthrate, longevity, gravity, and inertia to make it swirl nicely on the burn/fire setting. Then after I added the camera I adjusted the Z radius accordingly.

The camera was fun, and I experimented with a few different movements before I decided a crash dolly would look best. A complication was the trapezoid used for the spot. I had to cut it until the camera had moved close enough to add it back in. So I faded it in at the opportune moment. It looked funny, so I correlated the reflections appearance with the spot light's appearance.

I added the lens flare effect and set myself up for the slate which was really simple. I almost used the same background as the original layer, with different colors and no floor. Put the text in, and added the motion. Then I threw in another lens flare and some motion blur to solidify it.

The transition took a little time, because I wanted a graphic match on the cut. Overall I think it turned out really clean.

I added the music in final cut. I hope you enjoy it!

Untitled from William Maddox on Vimeo.

-Will

Metroid's run for your lives ...

This was a fun little effect. I cut out a picture of Samus and placed her atop that little planet in photoshop. Then I took that image and stuck it in After Effects.

I wanted to have Samus charging up her laser beam. I went ahead and slapped a Beam affect on her. I made the start point her gun and the end point just off screen so it was faux 3D. Then i just adjusted the length and timing to where I wanted it.

Then I needed my little charge up particles.

I wanted little power spheres, so I went ahead and made my particles faded spheres after trying both bubbles and shaded spheres. I matched the color to the lightest part of the beam. My rate was only .2 per frame and my longevity was about half a second. I didn't want there to be much coming out of the gun, just a slight effect of charging particles. For the motion I ended up using the twirly and adjusted the camera position, so that they looked like they were spreading out from the gun rather than falling out. Then I adjusted the emitter position to line it up with the barrel of her cannon.

Boom! I'm a firing my laser!

Untitled from William Maddox on Vimeo.

motion tracking

I used 2 trackers to follow the top corners of this letter. I basically went frame by frame seeing if the trackers were following, then I would let it play and see if it would stay on. To try and reduce the rotation, shake, and scaling problems I went into the graph editor and removed keyframes that seemed to cause problems. Then I just attached a text layer to the null and made a nice little letter...

Untitled from William Maddox on Vimeo.

Falling in some sort of alternative universe

Nothing like Chroma Key.

It was pretty simple. I grabbed the footage. Then I used this keylight tutorial found here .

From there his hand was a little cropped b/c it went out of the shot. So I trimmed the workspace to a square I cut out around him. From there I just threw a glow on.

falling down like yikes. from William Maddox on Vimeo.

superman titles

This was a relatively painless procedure once you found the right walk thru online.

For this project I started out with my main body text "dorm antenna cable"

I set the background color and the font color and adjusted the kerning. Once I knew what I wanted the text to look like at the end, I animated per character and changed the scale and opacity. I also threw a blur on there as well. Then I turned on the ease to make it a nice fluid bump that runs through the text as it appears.

The superman text numbers:

I found a little tutorial that showed me how to change some of the specific settings on the echo filter. This achieves the text stretch. I turned on motion blur to help this as well.

To find out how to do this effect:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKmMHFsIxQc



Then at the end I put a camera on a null to dolly into the moving text.

This will be used as a closing slide for some TSTV commercials next spring.

Digital Slate from William Maddox on Vimeo.

=Will

A Shining Halloween Treat

So you love the shining and you love After Effects 3D. Whatever will you do to combine the two:

First:

I grabbed a pic of the Grady Twins and masked out the ugly crappy hotel hall from the movie.

I grabbed another hotel hallway and created a vanishing point in Photoshop to make it 3D.

Pull both of those badboys into after effects. I started out with my lights. I made an ambient navy light that would flash on an off still leaving some deep blue shadows. Then I placed a spot light at the light fixture in the picture. Made it point down and out towards the camera. I put a camera in there and dollied it forward while playing with the orientation to make the hallway rotate a little bit. I also added a bit of wiggle to give it a slight handheld effect with a magnitude of 6. From there I just added the Grady twins in and leashed them to the camera. I set some opacity key frames to make them ghost like and there you have it.

A new shining scene.

Shining Hallway from William Maddox on Vimeo.

Me 2 Me 2 Me 2 Me 2 Me 2 Me 2 Me etc.

This looks great, and was very simple. I framed the shot the way I wanted and left the camera running. Shot myself and captured.

Then in after effects I just opened up the mask settings in my timeline. Split the footage with shift, command, D and lined them up in the timeline. Then I just used the pen tool to cut myself out (the sitting me) and there you have it.

Easy way to get as much "you" as you need.

Willy and Billy from William Maddox on Vimeo.

I love the puppet tool

So this guy in the America hot air balloon is totally going to die...  

This was a fun little project.  I got several hot air balloons, a few of which I did not use.  Used a mask to cut them out, and smoothed to refine the shape.  Then I got a picture of Austrian Alp background, and put a lens blur on it.  

I originally wanted to do a hot air balloon race, but didn't think that it would make use of some of the more advanced animation features.  

I think the temporal idea behind this is that balloons are constantly changing in speed depending on the wind.  

I did all of the movement with scale and position.  I pushed the anchor point out of the composition to make it huge in the ground and chug its way across the screen.  Once I had all of the key frames set, I got in the graph editor and started playing with the curves to make it decelerate as it got further away from the camera. 

Then came the puppet tool.  When I saw it for the first time, I knew it would work perfectly on a balloon. So i set 10 pins in the balloon and went to the end of my timeline and scrunched it up to blow up this guys balloon.  All that is missing is a crash, scream, explosion.  

Untitled from William Maddox on Vimeo.

Pac Man folly

So I wanted to make a video game for my simple animation, and I felt like with the tools we learned the best option was Pac Man. There isn't that much to this one. I found this picture on google and threw it into photoshop. In there I made a mask over the whole thing. Lassoed the characters and made a new layer via copy. Then I cut out the path I wanted them to take and filled in where the characters were with black. You can see that its a little messy around the bottom where the blue ghost starts. Then I saved that background and used it as my background in after effects. I also cut Pac Man in half, so that I could do the "chomp" rotation.

So in After Effects.

I threw my background in, and then my characters. I animated the ghosts movements first and just used the position tool to get them where I wanted them, and checked to make sure they stayed in the lines. I watched it a couple of times and adjusted the speeds. Then came pac man. I used the rotation on both layers of pacman and had to checkerboard my copy pastes or else the timing wouldn't match up. Then I would drop the opacity out of the dots pac man was moving over as I animated him.

The end.

I wish I had the music.

Untitled from William Maddox on Vimeo.

North by Star Wars

This was a really strange experiment. When we first got the assignment I brought 3 completely different pictures in, not sure what I wanted to do. Then when we started masking, I decided I definitely wanted this recreation of the famous NXNW scene with Seth Rogen. It's RIDICULOUS! So from there I started thinking what things I could do. I originally wanted to get like a flying saucer U.F.O. and put it behind him. Then have it shooting a barn or something. However I just really didn't like that brown tented background. So then I thought why not in space, and from there Star Wars...

So I started by masking out Seth, which was really difficult because the original desaturated brown exterior matched his suit. So Magic wand was out. Magnetic lasso was just ruining the wrinkles in his suit, so I got out the lasso and went piece by piece. Once I got a rough version of that, I went ahead and threw the moonscape on. I took a short cut and just lassoed a line about halfway across it to make a horizon and knew I would blur it later so it wouldn't look too bad. Then got that space skyline and plopped it on. Then I created a duplicate and placed it atop, did a quick mask and used the gradient tool to make a nice lens blur. I made it kind of light, and changed the shape to 7 sidedp; i also added some monochrome noise, to try and make it a little more 70s Star Wars. Then I dropped the opacity just to keep it from being too harsh. Then I added the Tie Fighter and blurred it a little separately . Followed by 2 layers of lasers that I drew with the line, and set one to screen and one to color sponge. Then I wanted more, so I added the death star. But then, I realized it was in focus so I had to go back and redo the gradient lens blur, which really was much easier the 2nd and 3rd time around (thanks Ben).

I couldn't stop there, so finally came the explosion. I masked that out, then added white dots and dirt that I clonestamped the rock pattern on. From there it was a trying series of radial blurs and now it joins you on my blog. I hope you enjoy the absurdness of this cacophony. I really wish I could've added Seth Rogen's eyes popping like Arnold in Total Recall. Ha!

...and so I ended up with a blog.

Welcome to my blog...

If you have continued reading to this point, you may be the first besides myself to do so. Please feel free to enjoy your stay here. I know I will.  The scenery is currently quite bare.  I'll see what I can do about that. 

Your host, 

William Maddox