Evaluation

I was very excited when I was given this brief as I really wanted to focus on 3D this year. I choose the SYFY channel as it was the one in the criteria that demanded 3d compositing.  I decided I wanted to use the film Cloverfield as inspiration for this 20 sec ident. The storyboards I drew up at first were far to complex and through my first presentation of my work I realised I needed to break down my idea from a whole story, to just some action of people running on screen and dragging someone off. On top of this I was going to composite the model of the space ship I was going to create.  I started off my project with some test footage. I had never tried to composite 3D on to live footage before so I went about trying to create that. I started on after effects, got some footage from a past project then using tracker motion on after effects I went about picking a point in the footage that I was going to use to track the motion of what ever image or sequence I choose .The result of test footage came through with poor quality so I went about finding another way to track the motion. Match mover is a program that is used for just that reason. I looked up some tutorials to find out how it worked. i had some troubles with the new software. i was then told that it would be a lot more easier to match on to static footage. I filmed on the Friday the 16^th. The people I used to act in my project had done acting either in school or/and in college. I had some problems on set as I was shooting of the street and had to deal with traffic and pedestrians getting in shot. I then started to model my spacecraft. The original drawing I made ended up being to complicated so I drew up a new design. The description of how I modelled it are on my blog. On Maya I had to set up a plane with the video footage so I could set up the perspective camera ready to animate to it. I set up the camera to the same specs as the camera the footage was filmed on, this was so that 3D animation would look correct as is it moved in the focal points of the shot. I then keyed in the animation of the spaceship. I wanted to make it look like it was hovering then when the people moved out of camera it was going to swing round and shoot of towards them out of camera. Trying to get the motion to look smooth was very hard because the model wasn’t just on the Y or X axis it was rotating around, so when I went on to the graph editor I couldn’t just edit the points because they wouldn’t match up.  I then had to try and composite. Once I had set up the camera on maya, compositing the 3D on to the video was just placing it on top on a layer on after effects. I then played around with both the lighting and colour corrections of both visuals. The trouble was the shadows that I had to render separately from maya, because it didn’t render out properly, I had to set up a shadow pass on an alfa channel layer and set up the lighting and shadow so that it would only render out the shadows . I then added some text effect using after effects then took it in to final cut and added some broken camera effects to give it the look of Cloverfield. Over all I think I followed the brief well and produced a product that set out to captivate the audience of people who would watch the channel. It used 3D effects and had visual effects made on after effects.