Created in Maya and After Effects, with music and stock footage courtesy of Andrew Kramer of Videocopilot.net (used with permission, in accordance with the VC license agreement).
Licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0
Characters and title are the intellectual property of Jim Butcher, and their use here in no way represents a challenge to Mr. Butcher’s ownership thereof.
Actors’ names represent a hypothetical cast for this movie and do not indicate any endorsement of or association with this video or producer.
The team consisted of me, Alexis Tomashosky, Anyul Garza, and Ruth Mentzer. Breakdowns by shot follow:
Shot 1, Liftoff: Matte painting constructed in Adobe Photoshop CS4 by Bryan Ray using elements provided by NASA (the launch pad), and cgtextures.com (several sky photographs). The shuttle was modeled in Autodesk Maya (versions 2008 – 2010) by Ruth Mentzer and textured with Maya and Photoshop by Bryan. Animation, fluid simulation, particle effects in Maya and compositing in The Foundry Nuke by Bryan.
Shot 2, Leaving the Earth: Earth texture provided by NASA. Earth and stars modeled and textured in Maya by Bryan. Cruise ship modeled in Maya by Ruth and textured (so to speak—really just simple materials) in Maya by Bryan. Animation and atmosphere effect by Alexis Tomashosky in Maya. Composited in Nuke by Alexis. Greenscreen footage keyed by Anyul Garza and Alexis in Nuke and Adobe After Effects. Shuttle as above.
Shot 3, the Lobby: Lobby modeled in Maya by Ruth and Alexis. Textured and lit in same by Alexis. Keying in After Effects and 3d tracking in PFTrack by Anyul. Map element by Bryan. Alexis composited in Nuke.
Shot 4, the Map: Modeling, texturing, lighting, fluid effects and animation in Maya by Bryan.
Shot 5, Orbiting Jupiter: Jupiter and stars modeled and textured in Maya by Bryan. Animation and engine effects in Maya by Bryan. Composited in Nuke by Bryan. Cruise ship as above.
Shot 6, Cabin: Room modeled and textured by Alexis and Bryan in Maya. Greenscreen footage keyed in After Effects by Anyul. Matte painting created in Maya by Bryan. Hologram animated in Maya and After Effects (+ Video Copilot’s Twitch plug-in) by Bryan and composited in Nuke.
Shot 7, Dining: Keying in After Effects and 3d tracking in PFTrack by Anyul. Modeling in Maya by Bryan and Ruth. Texturing and lighting in Maya and compositing in Nuke by Ruth.
Shot 8, Sun Deck: Sun model, texture, and fluid simulation in Maya by Bryan. Deck modeled and textured in Maya by Ruth. Keying in After Effects and tracking in PFTrack by Anyul. Rotoscoping in After Effects and Nuke by Ruth and Anyul. Compositing in Nuke by Ruth.
Shot 9, Freefall Room: Keying in After Effects by Anyul. Modeling in Maya by Alexis. Lighting in Maya by Alexis, Anyul, and instructor Ognian Bozikov. Compositing by Anyul in Nuke. Flying rig by Daniel Mentzer.
Shot 10, Logo: Mars and stars modeled and textured in Maya by Bryan Ray. Animation and compositing in Nuke by Anyul. Logo created in Adobe Illustrator by Bryan. Additional compositing in After Effects by Bryan. Cruise ship as above.
Screen talent: Alexis, Bryan, Kat Michels, Todd Judd, Vince Chowdhury, Tasha Muhammad, and Marcus Porter.
Music: “Jupiter” from The Planets Suite composed by Gustav Holst and mutilated in Adobe Soundbooth and Premiere by Bryan. Voice over by Jessica Ray and recorded in Soundbooth by Bryan. Sound effects from an unknown library that’s been kicking around on one of my hard drives for years. Audio mastering by Anyul and Bryan
Editing by Ruth and Bryan in After Effects and Premiere. Special technical support by instructor Ognian Bozikov.
Thanks to the Art Institute of Colorado for the use of a Panasonic HVX200 camera, greenscreen stage, video studio, portable greenscreen kit, and the 60+ Macintosh computers we used for rendering on the weekends.
For Motion Graphics II, our first major project was to create a neutral political talk show opener. So here is my entry. Stock footage courtesy of Digital Juice.
Content temporarily removed due to licensing issues. I don’t have the rights to post the music on the Internet; I’ll have to find something royalty-free or make it myself.
I was assigned a simple chroma-keying exercise in Motion Graphics II. Since I had little else due, I decided to take it a bit further than that. I am one of the soldiers, the other is Seth Lawrey. Muzzle flashes and fog from a footage collection by Andrew Kramer of Videocopilot.net. Costumes by John White. Miniature terrain built by me, Ruth Mentzer, John White, Sebastian Hernandez, Tim Mohatt, Seth Lawrey, Nick Person, Alan Province and instructor Todd Debreceni. Guns by Todd Debreceni. Sky provided by Cgtextures.com. The composite was done in After Effects CS4.
This is the final project for my Intermediate Editing class. I drew heavily on 7:15FX, an extracurricular visual effects group that I am a part of, for talent and technical support. Four of us are in the same editing class, so it was easy to turn this into a group project. I wrote the script and drew some storyboards; I was also both the director and cinematographer during production. Alexis Tomashosky was the production assistant, helping me to set the lights, managing the microphone boom, assisting the actors, and doing some set dressing. Jon Franks, Ian Morrell and Grant McMinn were the actors. During post-production, I did the editing, audio, some stylistic color grading, and a little bit of visual effects—the blood splatters on Ian’s shirt were mine. Jon did all the rest of the visual and audio effects, which was mainly the muzzle flashes and gunshots. Alexis did the color correction and a little bit of editing.
The piece was shot with a Panasonic DVX100a DV video camera. Edited in Premiere, mastering and effects in After Effects, audio in Soundbooth and Acid.
For my final project in Compositing, I was required to create two scenes of 5 seconds or longer using the techniques we’d learned in class. My Visual Effects Field Production class, meanwhile, had produced lots of great footage and assets for our use in later classes. So I decided I wanted to show our ship flying down the valley in our miniature and attack the gun emplacements. My reach exceeded my grasp somewhat, and I don’t have time to do the combat effects. The flythrough and environment elements did, however, get done.
The ship was modeled by Alan Province in 3dsMax. I textured and animated it using Maya. The miniature was built by everyone in the VFX class and shot on greenscreen. This composite contains four different angles on the miniature. The camera move was tracked in PFTrack, and that data was exported to Maya to assist in animating the ship. I pulled the mattes and created the engine blasts in After Effects, then the entire thing was composited in Shake. The sky backdrop and many of the textures on the ship are courtesy of cgtextures.com and used in compliance with their license.
Intermediate Editing. Shot on a Panasonic DVX-100a in my apartment and the Art Institute’s greenscreen studio. Edited in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, effects and mastering in After Effects CS4, and audio in Sony Acid Pro 4.
For this project, the class collectively came up with the title “What Goes Around Comes Around.” Then we each wrote down an adjective and randomly drew the words from a hat to give us a guiding theme for our videos. I drew “artificial.”
I had a very limited amount of time to accomplish my shooting, since I could only get into the studio for about three hours, and I hadn’t shot any of my empty plates yet, so I didn’t have camera angle and focal length data. I think I accomplished what I was after, though, for the most part. I think my shot composition is improving rapidly, but I need to set aside time for storyboarding next time.
This was an experiment in frustration. One member of my four-person team was assigned location scouting, scoring, and costuming. After the first in-class meeting, he dropped the course without telling any of us. I kept calling, and he kept saying he’d be there at the next meeting, but he never, ever showed up. So we did a lot of improvising for locations and just forgot about costuming and make-up entirely.
Another member had a death in the family and took off to the East Coast for two weeks. Again, without informing anyone. He left his phone behind and never checked his email. He was supposed to have been the main character. I gave him the opportunity to redeem himself by editing the more difficult scenes, but he failed to hit a single deadline, so I wound up having to edit his scenes myself at the eleventh hour.
Member #3 was the bright spot for me. He showed up to every meeting, he procured our equipment and arranged time in the greenscreen studio. He, also, had editing duties, but although his scenes were delivered on time, he apparently had no clue what was meant by “editing.” I wound up editing those scenes myself, too, plus doing the visual effects, graphics, audio processing, scoring, and DVD mastering.
Had I known at the outset that it was going to be a solo project I would have been far better off.