Category Archives: VFX

Post-School VFX

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post-schooling projects, personal and for-profit

This was more of a motion-graphics or compositing project than anything, my roommate (classmate from school) and I took photos of a gravestone prop in a local field and replicated them in, adding another hill in the background, some 3D gravestones, a fence and a tomb in the background. I matte-painted a city and sky with distant mountains, and using Shake made the city lights flicker a bit. I moved the camera in slowly throughout the course of the shot with different-distance objects moving at different speeds to emulate parallax. The movement is super subtle and basically unnoticeable unless it’s pointed out, but it was a cool exercise.

Watch Final Graveyard on YouTube.

After school and the above project, and with tons of help from an old teacher/adviser, a few of us got work on a small film that came into town. Icarus was a Dolph Lundgren action movie that needed some enhancement. We added blood spray, sparks and bullet hits, debris and smoke and other elements to a collection of shots. It was a good experience.

Watch VFX Reel Winter 2009 on YouTube.

VFX in Vancouver

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school half-year and final reels

My half-year reel is just a collection of all the better stuff I did in the first semester at VanArts.

Term 1 Reel

Our final project was a Sweeny Todd-inspired 3-shot short that involved extensive rotoscoping, a full 3D city background replacement and even shot extension. We started filming the opening shot as high as our Cinematographer’s crane would allow, but we envisioned the shot starting above the rooftops, tracking along the roof line and then down into the street to see our actor.

To get that high up and see a whole city, the city had to be modeled, textured and lit, then a camera was animated along the roof line and down into the street to meet up with the point where the real camera move began. The actor had to be entirely rotoscoped out of the existing environment and placed in the newly-created old-London city street.

Because the real camera move begins low in the air compared to our CG buildings, the part of the shot where we would see the actor before we actually had footage of him, we needed some kind of person to be walking along the street before he really was. To accomplish this, I had to cut him out, cut him up, and re-animate a still frame of him walking down the sidewalk from the point where the camera comes out from behind the building to where it meets with the real camera. After doing this for almost a month, it never improved, and always look mechanical and bad. Not to mention I had almost a minute of footage to rotoscope already and the background replacement for one street was more than enough work for the guys doing the 3D work.

Final Project: Morte Street Website

World Space Odyssey

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sci-fi short film/visual effects experiment

Watch World Space Odyssey on YouTube.

This was a short film project I made in my senior year of high school and served as a sort of intro to visual effects, although I hadn’t thought of it as that at the time. But it was great, I set up my garage with a big green sheet, some worklights, my homemade dolly and shot everything in a day. I did all the post work (compositing and editing) in Adobe Premiere, and used the MIDI setup at school (don’t remember what software they had) for the soundtrack, in addition to using music by Justin R. Durban.