The start of this lesson set up the mood for the entirety. Mathematics. I dislike this subject, as most creatives do, and seeing it on screen applied to something which doesn’t really need to involve maths was a little frustrating. But that is all down to the personal opinion of course, and I am glad we weren’t made to solve the equations, since I am out of practice. All we were asked was to identify what they were referring to, which was actually, equally challenging a puzzle.
As it turns out, these are all blending modes. I would never have guessed, even if one of the letters had ‘photoshop’ next to it. This surprising fact brought us to the main task that we would be doing: delving back into compositing but this time, playing with some assets we were given. In the long term, the file that we create in the lesson will be used to produce a VFX breakdown. I enjoy every aspect of the course, but if I had to choose a least favourite, it would be the aspects of VFX like these. Simple editing I can do, but compositing, layering things, putting them one on top of each other, and together and making it look realistic is an art that I cannot get the knack of. Every green screen video and in fact, almost every film that I have attempted to create, looks decent at best but never to the standard that I would like it to be. So I wasn’t too thrilled that we would be going back to this, but I also understand that a skill needs to be practised or it will be lost, so the recap was nice.
Compositing – the process in which two or more visual elements are combined to make the appearance of a single picture, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene.
Back to the starter, one of the methods that are used to achieve this is by using blending modes. They are digital image editing and computer graphics are used to determine how two layers are blended with each other with examples including Screen, Add, Multiply, Overlay, Divide, Difference. Before, artists had to manually input the equations relative to the blending mode they wanted, hence why we were shown them in the form of mathematical operations between the two RGBA values of both images/videos. The most important one that we were told to take away from the lesson and remember is a+b(1-a). It is the normal function of After Effects, referring to the alpha channel 0-1 that every video has.
Stock Footage
Some assets are sold as pre-keyed, meaning they already contain an alpha channel and are very easily added to a scene. These are generally called stock videos or footage and can be used in films, making them very useful to filmmakers as they save shooting new material. Black, white, mid-grey, green or blue backgrounds are what the effects are filmed against, in order to them be keyed out or removed using a blending mode. You can simply download, drag and drop, and with websites such as the examples below, it can be very easy to get the right assets.
- Pixabay
- Detonation Films
- Action VFX
- Action Essentials
- Triune
- FootageCrate
Now, onto our task. We were to create a VFX composite using a particular genre as the main focus. Another goal was also to use a range of assets including the stock footage effects that were procured for us, which I was looking forward to seeing since it can be hard to find good quality free videos at times, even with the many stock libraries. It was recommended to use the random emoji generator if we were struggling to come up with a narrative and needed some help and also techniques such as rotoscope, chroma-keying and shot clean up on any stock asset we want to use but need to fix, to spice things up.
Extension: make the VFX work invisible by colour grading and hiding any visible seams.
Unfortunately, looking back now, it seems that I have lost the screenshots that I took for this task. This never happens since always make sure to save my PowerPoint with evidence onto my USB, but I can’t find the PP that I had open at the time. Thankfully, I still have the folder with work and the final render and I can also talk about my process.
First, I looked through the assets that Confetti had on hand for us to use. The folder had good quality footage but I was having trouble seeing how I could apply them. For example, the steam coming from the sides – all I could think about was ‘dragon’ but that wouldn’t be subtle at all and would defeat the whole point of the lesson. The goal was to create something realistic and blend footage together seamlessly, so I started hunting through Pixabay and youtube to see if I could get some ideas. I found a video of an old shed and decided to create an explosion somehow. This lead me on to think about superhero fights/landings and how they can cause massive explosions but again that isn’t subtle! It was like my brain was wired only to think about the exciting and the fantastical, but I suppose that’s because I think it’s a little boring having the opportunity to create anything and settling just with the illusion of something based in reality. Anyhow, I had to dial back a bit and went for a person falling instead. I don’t know why that would make an explosion, but it’s better than a tacky superman comp.
After downloading everything I needed imported into After effects, I began layering the videos and chosen effects from Confetti’s folder. It was pretty simple, chroma-keying for the green screen and blending modes for the pre-keyed assets. I mainly used ‘add’ and ‘lighten’ since they kept the colours as accurate to the original as possible. I positioned, scaled and also played with the time of the clips to make the man fall faster and have more of a dramatic impact when landing on the ground. I could tell that the end result wouldn’t be subtle and realistic but I kept trying, layering different smokes and debris explosions and even adding embers. I drew masks and feathered, I used ‘curves’ and ‘Lumetri Colour’ to colour grade, making the background brighter when the explosion happened and adding a red tint to show danger, but nothing really fixed the blatant fakeness that good VFX artist disguise. When it was time to save up, I went into ‘file’, ‘dependencies’ and chose ‘collect files’. This is something I have done many times before thanks to my work experience at Stencil, where we always sent off our work this way. It is done so that even if you don’t have the downloaded videos, everything still works as it should when you use the AE file next.
Here is the final video. As you can see, it doesn’t make much sense, but I do recognise that I didn’t do a bad job at layering the clips, and I even animated them to scale up slightly in order to match with the zoom that the original footage of the shed had. If I really wanted to challenge myself, I would have made the man fall into the shed, but at the time I thought that I wouldn’t have enough time to finish a task like that and opted for the simpler option. This is the problem that I experience almost every single time we have one of these lessons. Projects that are worth finishing are too big to complete in the limited time we have in the lesson. But that’s where the best software is. My Premiere pro at home is far too slow, and never get to create the things I want unless I take time out to go to Confetti outside of lesson hours. I don’t have that kind of time to spare at the moment with the project, so my only choice was to do something I knew I would at least finish during the lesson. In a similar way to the car explosion breakdown, I would have liked to make bits of the house/she fly off and show the explosion really affecting it, but to be frank, I am not sure how exactly I would do that. I think that I would need to find a separate clip of a similar-looking piece of rock flying outwards and composite that in, using colour grading and to blend. Invisible VFX work really is a work of art.