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.