Fun in reverse

Presenting a compilation of videos we purposely filmed so they would do cool things in reverse.. enjoy :)



Its great when you catch a bit of time to fulfill creative curiosity! I captured the footage on my new Sony NEX-5 which I love. Featured in the video is my girlfriend Nina, cousins Brenda and Eddie and myself.

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Barista Post progress - rotoscoping complete :-)

This has been a bit of an unforeseen mission! Generally speaking it has gone along fine but there have been a few moments of 'when will it end!' After keying out the blue colour, there was still a bit of grey fringing going on. On the good latte I thought it was necessary to keep all the hands in for Tom to trace over and create the cartoon hands. Half way through doing it Alex mentioned that I didn't need to worry about the hands as Tom could just start using the live action footage to trace over and then comp it later. I thought I may as well continue tracing areas out around the hands for the rest of the good latte and it could go on my showreel. On the bad latte I adopted a much simpler method as you will see further down..

Heres an image from the original footage.



I divided the images into groups of 50 and set up a work flow through composite, keying the images then adding several animated garbage masks to go over the grey zones. The grey fringing occurred because when I extracted all the blue background using the keyer it also extracted other parts of the image where the blue was reflected (such as parts of the cup.) So I could use keying but only to a certain extent.

Generally it was fine - I added around 5-10 masks for each 50 frames but for the penultimate 50 frames of the good latte I had to add over 30 animated masks! This was mainly to eliminate the grey fringing caused by motion blur from the hands and jug.

The first image shows the grey areas that needed extracting, then the next one shows all the masks that I needed to create to do it! This was after Alex told me I didn't have to worry about the hands so it was my own provocative.




This image is taken from the badly poured latte. In contrast to above, I did this way quicker. It just required 2 masks - 1 static mask for the cup then another animated one for the jug. As you can see I didn't worry about the arms or hands here. I kept the keyer applied to keep the colours consistent to the good latte.



Here is the result of my work. You can see white fringing around the hands in the good latte movie, but in practice once these are imported into animate pro and the transparency is set to straight the white fringing goes away so it shouldn't be a problem.





It feels good to say I have now completed this task!
(provided that Alex is happy with it..)

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Projected History.. My ship is now in ship shape! Woo!

This project has been chugging along happily in the background alongside all our other projects and so it has taken a while but.. the ship is pretty much complete(depending on Simons approval.) This image shows my work in progress.



Firstly, I created two patches for the front and back of the ship that imitated the curves of my original Polygon ship. Then I stitched the patches together - adding another curve to the front half before stitching to keep the result in the right shape (second image.) Following this I converted it to Polygons (third image) then divided up the hull into six areas (fourth image) in order to add on the 6 separate texture maps. This allowed for the texture to be detailed all the way across (which is important as this will eventually be projected to a very large size.) Since this work in progress image, I have changed the font and perfecting the texture as much as possible in photoshop to keep it looking as life like as possible.

I think ultimately it would have been good to get photos of this ship using a good DSLR camera on a more overcast day as opposed to using my compact camera on a sunny day. The problem was these ships come and go fairly quickly, so the opportunity for photographing on a day with overcast weather whilst this ship was at the docks didn't present itself (typical!)

Here is a little test movie of the most basic way in which the ship will be animated. At this stage I'm not sure to what extent the building will be in front of it - you may just be seeing it through the buildings windows. The idea is that the hull will occupy the size of the whole building as it goes through it.



Since the completion of my ship, I have been experimenting with the ocean shader in Maya. The first image has been rendered using mental ray, and the second - using maya software. As shown both cause problems, but I'm sure there will be away around these. It requires a bit of research and playing around with render settings, using alpha channels and composite. The question is whether there is need for the ocean. It looks cool but would it make sense perspectively looking at it going through a building..





Here are a couple of images I rendered just for the sake of it. (I used photoshop to get rid of the visual errors that came out in the renders like those above.)





Nice :)

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