Slow Mo in class

One Minute Movie

This was an especially fun project because we were given a short amount of time to cooperate, brainstorm, shoot and composite everything. This usually makes for a good project because the movie actually gets done. I enjoyed practicing my directing with people and having them see things the way I wanted the scene to come out. I was glad that the team had similar ideas as me, that they could get what I was talking about and were cool with using everyone's ideas.
P.S.- this video gave me a laughing induced asthma attack.

Car Crash

This was a neat project because we got to go outside and stand in the street. It is actually nice to go outside sometimes and this project took a lot of cooperation among everyone.

Difficulties: Communication is always the number one issue when it comes to working with people especially when you want them to see what you are seeing in your head. That day we had people standing across the street trying to work a green screen with cars coming and a camera pretty far away from the green screen. This made it tough for everyone to be on the same page. However in the end we followed the tutorial and it came out decent and we all went out for fried ice cream.

Audio Levels in class

Apple Quasar: Final

I tried to figure out what kind of scenario would take place in which the kinds of visual effects we learned over the semester would most believably happen. I also have always wanted to do a trippy sequence with intense music and visuals.

Difficulties: The only difficulties in this one came from not getting enough footage in a certain take or keeping the camera on something or someone long enough. This included the normal scenes and when my friends were on the green screen. That lead to some work on my part in post production but good to learn from. These guys were such good actors though that directing them was easy and it seems as though they were born ready every day to play a part in a movie, just hoping to act silly in some way. What made this project easy as well was that there is so much green screen footage online that I can key and use in my projects like the moving R2-D2. It would be fun to make something like this for my capstone, a little longer and with more plot and people on green screen.

Weather Report In Class

Stars in class

Voice Over

Motion Tracking in class

motion tracking is tricky sometimes when I cannot get the things to stick to fast moving reference points, but I see how I can use it in the future.

John Towsen, Explodes! (Shatter in class)

John Towsen has had another hard days work at Bloomfield College and just ends up exploding. Who knew he was made of little pink hard candies.

The Dumbest Kinetic Typography Ever

A kinetic typography of Dumb and Dumber, a movie I watched a few thousand times as a kid probably. Jim Carrey makes any video project fun.

Difficulties: Finding a movie I wanted to use took me a long time because most of the time a hilarious scene does not have enough dialogue. When working on the animating, I found the toughest part was when I began to have a dozen or two things moving on the screen at once, and because they had to do so many independent things, pre-composing was not always the best solution to organization. After that, it was just figuring out what font or image would be the most comical for what was happening, and why is it so hard to find a picture of a damn stamper?

When Water Bottles, Attack! (Disintegration)

The most dangerous species to man, caught on tape!

Difficulties: shooting all the scenes correctly so it really looked like I threw the bottle to my back left and have James catch it from his front left, and have it look like the camera only shifts to the left a little and not like I had to shoot all these shots in different areas of a room.

Dogs and Cats

Treadmill Stuff And Green Screen Suit

when I first realized you can put TWO penguins into ONE movie.

Green Screen Comparison

In this video I am dancing with my friend Corey's hat once really in front of the door and the other time in front of a green screen. Can you tell which is which?

Difficulties: I tried a totally different video which took me an hour or so where Corey and I kick a chair behind us. The chairs were going to move in the green screen after we shot video of us pulling the chairs and I reversed the footage, but they would not pull straight. On the After Effects side of things, getting the green screen footage to line up exactly with the color of the actual footage was difficult, but in the end it might have helped confuse viewers with the illusion.

Eaganator (Greenscreening actor into movie)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXuQmkTgvSo

This is the link because YouTube is not allowing embedding for copyrighted material.

I get into the role of Terminator, a movie that I have really enjoyed ever since I was 1.3 years old. I searched for cool movies for a long time that interested me and at the same time had camera angles that made it easy to fit somebody into with after effects.

Difficulties: getting myself to be the exact same size as Arnold in the frames proved challenging especially after I thought I had it, packed up all my equipment, went into the other lab room, uploaded the footage and realized I was too far from the camera and had to obtain a leather jacket again and reshoot. Not leaving myself enough time for green screen tweaking was also a mistake as I forgot how many countless hours it can take. Editing out Arney with the clone stamp tool was also clumsy at first but after a few tries, I finally became...                                                 "The Eraser.”

Fight or Flight.. Of Stairs! (Action Scene)

Tom and Ryan have a little dispute after Ryan steals Tom’s computer. This is one of those videos that sort of makes itself after I get a camera and 4 other testosteronian guys in the same room at the same time. As a testament to the instant creativity a lot of CAT majors poses, I really just told Tom and Ryan to have “conflict” which resulted in their improve introduction. I think it was fun for everyone and I learned a little bit about camera angles and myself along the way.

Difficulties: Motivating myself to get off my butt and get a camera and 4 testosteronian guys in the same room. After that it was really just getting the right camera angle for each sequence, not actually hurting ourselves (which we came close to failing at several times), and getting the right hit sound effects in post production. For the sound effects I probably should have recorded my own at the scene of the shoot, but they might not have been as silly.

100 Years of Visual Effects

Maybe it will spark an idea, someone will find it interesting, or maybe it'll be another effective waste of time.

Serious Business (Doubles)

Here is a project that required me to have multiples of myself in one shot. Sounds pretty impossible don’t it? Well unless you are in John Towsen’s class, it is. I took a number of shots of myself doing things around the table and compiled the best ones in After Effects, making sure the timing was right on all the crazy characters.

Difficulties: I did not have a partner to help me with this so when aiming for my face with the slap I was doing a lot of guessing. I also had to do retakes every time I noticed that I might have been infringing on my counterparts space which would make masking more difficult. This happened a lot with the dancing and here again I could also have used an assistant.

When Magic Goes Wrong (stop action substitution)

For the assignment on object substitution I wanted to make something a little more entertaining than the simple disappearing of an item. I felt that I would need a helper on this one and got my friend Jacquie to cooperate. I swapped the objects in this scene in the craziest order I could possible think of as the few takes I shot had little planning about the details.

Difficulties: In this one I could have used a 3^rd person to move the objects around so that I did not have to do that myself altering my body’s position. Other than that everything else was easily done on the computer.

Stop action substitution

This is just one of those days when your sandwich keeps turning into a damn glove. But it was an eye opener into how much needs to be taken into consideration when setting up a substitution scene. It may seem short but each action required a little bit of thinking.

Difficulties: I first shot it with people behind me which obviously ruined everything by creating a different background with every cut. The second time I shot it I ended up asking a stranger for help in the cafeteria which turned out nice because we are now friends. Having an assistant was paramount to doing this type of thing and the biggest issue was figuring out how to explain the directions of exactly what I needed them to do with the sandwich and/or glove.