Our friend Richard Lainhart sends this lovely "swirly thing" (to use technical terms). His description:
An abstract HD film animated in After Effects. The soundtrack, "The Beautiful Blue Sky", is a realtime electronic synthesizer improvisation for Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum.
My description:
Mmmm…
Oh, sorry. Forgot what I was saying: staring into swirly thing. Hey, it’s the weekend. Enjoy!
This is something I’ve been working on for quite a while, but I’ve realised that there are too many new things on the horizon which will take up my time (and my computers’ CPU cycles) so I’ve decided to release it as a draft rather than sitting on it until "perfect".
While there’s still some editing and motion tweaking to be done, this piece is rather time consuming to preview and render. As the action speeds up it is blending many high resolution images together for each frame.
The video compresses around 10 hours of stencil cutting into 4 minutes. Shot with the same Pentax *ist DS as my previous time lapse efforts, the camera takes around 35 frames per minute at 1536×1024. This gives plenty of leeway for pan and scan in post production if outputting to SD or lower resolutions.
This method of shooting allows a very high quality look, with minimal expenditure. I had some problems with this camera’s viewfinder focus and auto-aperture function recently, the repair quote was AU$300, while a new K100D (the new version of the *ist) is under AU$600 including a lens. With prices for digital SLRs getting this low, a proper SLR version of the ghetto timeslice rig can’t be too far away.
If you’ve been staring at After Effects too long, you’ll really love this one: common motion effects, painstakingly recreated by real people — jumping on trampolines. There’s even a status bar and, my personal favorite touch, an I/O error and — okay, I won’t give it away.
Directed by Roel Wouters a.k.a. Xelor. Here’s the full blurb (see also cast & crew on the YouTube page):
zZz is playing: Grip is a video for the band zZz. Its a one take, top shot videoclip with trampoline gymnasts simulating typical video effects. The video has been recorded live as part of the opening ‘Nederclips’ at the Stedelijk museum ‘S-Hertogenbosch SM’S (curated by Bart Rutten).
The project was commissioned by the TAX-videoclipfonds and an important criteria was that the audience of the opening was be able to witness the whole shoot, another criteria was that it should be added to the exhibition imediately after the shoot was done. So we had no option to reshoot or edit if something went wrong. This made us so focussed [sic] that we did better that any of us have could imagined.
Thanks to star blogger Christine Huang at PSFK, from whom I stole this, before she lost the draft of her blog post. Also seen on the excellent Motionographer.
Your challenge: recreate overused VJ effects using real people. Hmmm… kaleidoscope effects? (Oh, and by the way, those of you using sample clips from apps like Resolume and Onyx-VJ? We’re watching. We’re at the club. We know your secret. Stop it. Or go recreate it on trampolines.)
This was shot in my Pentax *ist DS, with an old, beat-up, 50mm F1.4 lens I picked up in Vietnam. The “intervalometer” in this case is even more ghetto than the electronics kit I put together a year ago. It’s a 2.5mm stereo mini jack with the cable release side soldered to ground. Plugging this in makes the camera think the shutter is held down constantly. Put the camera in “burst” shooting mode and it will happily fire off a frame every ~1.7 seconds until it runs out of battery or SD card space. Drop the resulting series of JPGs into a folder, import as footage into After Effects, resize, crop, done. Pretty timelapse.
The actual shooting of this was similarly simple: The popcicle stick was attached to the tripod of a dual-500W work light with a strong magnet. 1000W of lights are sitting just out of shot, accellerating the melting process.
Advantages of this method: This is a relatively cheap way to get extremely high quality source material. The resulting video is natively 3000×2000 pixels, and shot on a camera and lens which would cost well under US$1000.
Disadvantages: I’m not sure how much of this treatment the shutter of an SLR is designed to take. Fortunately Digi SLRs are generally more professional gear, so they should be able to take a reasonable amount of punishment, and plenty of professional shooters will snap off thousands of images in a day, they’re just not quite holding the shutter down constantly for 45 minutes. I’ve used the camera on probably 20-30 of these shoots, rolled over the shot counter several times, and haven’t seen any smoke or blue sparks yet, so hopefully it will continue to work out.
Studio Daily has a sneak peek video of the new Magic Bullet Looks - a plugin for After Effects and other hosts, as well as a standalone application for applying ‘looks’ to footage. The Magic Bullet Looks workflow is quite innovative, and when you see it, you’ll probably have a ‘why didnt I think of that’ moment - see for yourself, I wont give it away. While not geared for visualists in any sense, its definitely a useful tool (as are almost all Magic Bullet plugins), but it got me thinking a bit about the standard metaphors for working with live video, effects chains, mixer buses and the like.
I really like the simplicity of Magic Bullet Looks. Im curious what innovative work flows could be made for working with live footage. Any suggestions or applications for mixing live that have given you pause for their workflow and interface?
Via the Create Digital Noise forums, Japanese electronic artist Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) has some terrific videos from director Koichiro Tsujikawa. Tsujikawa has not surprisingly racked up some awards for his work over the last few years. Via Getty Images:
A highly regarded and inventive director, Koichiro Tsujikawa is a self-taught filmmaker whose reputation as an artist and designer is what initially led him to film. Most recently, Tsujikawa won best music video of 2003 at RESFEST’s Audience Music Choice Awards for “Drop (Do it Again)” featuring music by Cornelius.
And he’s an After Effects user. Okay, not terribly enlightening. More enlightening: watching the videos.
Output Multiple Files With a Single Render in After Effects -
I’m currently pumping out some renders of Time Lapse shoots for gigs I have over the weekend. I’m outputting 640×480 MJPEG AVIs for visual use, and also 320×240 H264 MOVs for sharing. After Effects is helping with its Multiple Output Module ability, letting me create several files with a single render. It’s quick and easy! Select the Render Item, click Composition > Output Module. Done!
He Makes Sparta Look Hot: VFX in Frank Miller’s 300 -
Studio Daily has an interview with 300’s VFX Art Director Grant Freckelton about the processes and ideas behind the look of Frank Miller’s 300 (Opened on the 9th, trailer on Apple.com). Like Sin City before it, this film is a visual feast, so it’s great to get a look at the processes and tools (Photoshop, After Effects, Shake) used by those bringing motion graphics to the big screen.
Unfortunately there isn’t any imagery of the production process, but the words held my interest all the way through. Linked is a short writeup on the challenges they had taking material shot underwater and making it look “dry”. (Think Portishead - Only You).
After Effects to Autoplaying DVD via Encore: Adobe Shows us How -
For bigger gigs I tend to include a DVD player running as a backup in case of a crash. I’ve never actually needed it yet, but it’s nice to have the safety net.
Here’s a simple technique utilizing Adobe Encore to turn your AFX composition into an Autoplaying DVD, sans menus. It also uses Dynamic Link (which I’m don’t use nearly enough), so if you update your composition you can rerender “direct” to DVD.
For super-simple DVD burning from just about any format your computer will play you can’t go past Nero Vision, but this is a slightly more interactive, professional technique.
AFX To 3D and Back Again: After Effects Plugins for 3D Studio Max -
Jonas of General Specialist seems to have been on a little holiday, but he’s back with two rapid-fire tips for those mixing “real” 3D into their After Effects:
Despite its name, the new version 2.0 of MAX2AE actually goes both ways, letting you start your designs in After Effects and at a later stage import the AE cameras and lights into 3ds max for further work, and then re-import into AE again.
Do you hate to go back and forth between your 3D app and After Effects, just to tweak the lighting so that it will match your composite? If you render out a quick normal map, you can easily and quickly move and change the lighting of your 3D renders.
Now there’s a free alternative to the commercial ZBornToy and WalkerFX Channel Lighting. Stefan Minning has kindly released a set of plugins for free, called Normality & Reality, so check them out.
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2007-Apr-12@13:58
