Proeye Showreel

Details on apps and other stuff in the link

Being a self-learner is vital to working in production. No one is going to ask you to take a course in visual effects, match moving, or anything. It normally lands in you lap as “Yeah, we want a new promo for Company X. It has to look like the ID’s on Foxtel. You’ve got 2 weeks”. Then it’s up to you to make it happen.

There are several places to get a bit of a helping hand. Here are a few that I’ve come across.

Full on 2+ year TAFE

A few years ago I went Northern Metropolitan Institue of TAFE (NMIT) and attended their TV training course.

It was a great course and definitely one I would wholeheartedly recommend. The facilities are amazing (full 4 camera HD studio, 4 Final Cut suites, 3 Avid suites, real kick ass). The course is heavily hands on. You work in teams and in the second year, all we did was produce content for external clients. The teachers there are fantastic, and soon you begin to think of them as mentors. I still catch up with them and talk through things.

It is great for those starting out, or who are running a smallish business and want the opportunity to get up to speed on a HD setup.

the Pixel Corps

The Pixel Corps are a guild of media developers producing a heap of content. Being a member gives you access to a wealth of information in a great community. The guys (and girls) are all willing to share information, and having the opportunity to work on a group project or tackle an exercise is invaluable.

The video training is fantastic. There is much more than can be absorbed in a year, and you get access to some pretty awesome industry standard software packages.

Libraries and Text books

Textbooks are always tricky, especially in anything tech related. As soon as the book is out, it seems that the new version of the software is out. However, there are some great books detailing the theories and processes behind the applications. A couple I can recommend are the DV Rebel’s Guide, Digital Compositing for Film and Video and a bit more app specific, but a great help was the Essential Blender

Using a library is a great way to get access to some pretty hefty textbooks. If you can’t find what you need there, normally you can ask and they’ll either get it from another library, or order it in. It’s you’re rates and taxes, so it’s worth making the most of it.

Community forums

Every software package has at least one forum dedicated to it. Creative Cow is a great place to start. They have a forum for everything I’ve ever used, and really helpful. There are the Apple forums, the Blender Artists and a host of others. Always search before asking a question, and try not to be an ass, cause then no one will help you.

Google the sucka

Yes. Do not underestimate Google when you’re stuck. I’ve found thousands of answers to my questions just by Googleing around. Most of the time you just need to put the right keywords in. Try the program, then a couple of words describing what you’re trying to do.
Like “shake track improve interlaced”. Refine it a few times, and drill a couple of pages down.

Keep your eye on it for cool stuff.

www.proeye.tv/blog

My wife and I have just finished writing a pretty comprehensive script for a client. I thought this would be a good opportunity to do a post on pre-production.

I find this stage of media creation the most important. Whenever I have brushed over, or thought that I haven’t had enough time for planning, I have regretted it. Projects become messy. Shots get missed. And worst of all, you end up in a place that is far, far away from the client’s original brief.

So, try to make the planning as comprehensive as possible.

Get familiar with the content.

Sometimes I wonder how people did anything before the Internet. After the initial meeting with the client, the company website is an invaluable tool to become familiar with the content. Product lines, sales methods, corporate look and feel. All this is there on a website. Most companies have a Corporate Identity booklet. It goes into incredible depth on how they want to be portrayed. Memorise that sucker. It should be your first port of call when crafting anything for them. You need to become an expert on the client. You should know as much about them and what they do as one of their employees.

Get inspired

I find that I write better after I watch an episode of the West Wing. I dunno why. It might have something to do with them constantly writing speeches and wot-not. Anyway, find out what inspires you, and indulge yourself before you start, or when you get stuck. But don’t let it become a source of procrastination, cause that happens to me too,

Do it

You get stuck a lot. That’s cool, because so do I. But when I do, I just write. Just put anything down. Most of the time it will be utter rubbish, but you’re still forming ideas, making things clearer in your head. And then leave it alone. For a day. Don’t look at it or think about it. Plan something else, like getting shooting locations, or write up the editing workflow. When you look at it again, you’ll think, man, what the hey was I tripping on. And then it gets better, because the more times you go over it, the tighter it gets, the more focused it gets and the clearer you become.

Keep it arms length

Remember the first time you give the finished script to the client, it’s going to be ripped apart. Don’t be too protective of it. As great a writer you are, it’s ridiculously difficult to get it right in one shot. But that’s cool. The more the language gets pulled and cut and twisted, the more it will be shaped into what it should be. They will still know things, like stats, case studies and examples that you might not have uncovered in your research. Hopefully you’re both on the same page, trying to make it as good as it can be.

Just uploaded a new clip, a short intro to a camp I participated in.

It was my first foray into 3D compositing. The spaceship was created in Blender, the open source 3D app. It featured as one of my recommendations on the Mustard Flava Podcast.

The composting was done in Shake. I really love the workflow in Shake. Coming from a Photoshop and After Effects background, nodal-based compositing is a really refreshing change.

nodal-based compositing

So, the idea is a spaceship heading towards the Jovian moon Io. I think i nearly pulled it off.

It includes; the updates Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Compressor 3, a new application called Color, and DVD Studio Pro 4.

Being a long term Studio user, I’m really excited about the updates. My 3D compositing experience has mainly been from using After Effects, and so having the capability integrated in the suite with Motion is fantastic. I’m very interested in Color also (well, not the American spelling, but there is nothing we can do about that) and it looks like an app that I will be spending a lot of time enjoying.

We’re getting a copy in the office pretty much as soon as it ships here in Australia, so stay tuned for pros and cons, hypes and gripes, and things that I’ll go ape over.

x = Math.pow(a-d, 2)+Math.pow(b-e, 2)+Math.pow(c-f, 2);
x = Math.sqrt(x);
m = Math.pow(d-g, 2)+Math.pow(e-h, 2)+Math.pow(f-i, 2);
m = Math.sqrt(m);

x = x / m;
x = x * 100;
x = 100 - x;

if(x<10){
x=10
}

Alright.

What we know is where the camera starts and ends. In After Effects, all the elements in 3D space have an x, y and z position, which is written like this

thisComp.layer("Roving Camera").position[0, 1, 2]

thisComp —the selected composition
layer("Roving Camera") — name of layer (which was actually a “virtual camera”)
position — the attribute we are editing
[0, 1, 2] — the three elements in a position attribute, that is, x y and z.

So, if I have a layer named ‘Han Solo’ and i wanted to make the variable ‘t’ its y position I would write

t = thisComp.layer("Han Solo").position[1]

Or, if I have a layer named ‘Ghengis’ and i wanted to make the variable ‘t’ its z position I would write

t = thisComp.layer("Ghengis").position[2]

So now we want the opacity of a layer (lets call it Jedi) to be proportional to how far away the Roving Camera is. We know the start point of the Roving Camera (an x, y, z coordinate) and we know its end point (and x, y, z coordinate in front of layer Jedi)

Now how to we find the distance between two points?

And so what about a z point? Well, the equation for that is

Distance between two points in 3D space =

So now we know the distance between the Roving Camera and layer Jedi.

in After Effects expression language this is:

a = thisComp.layer("Roving Camera").pointOfInterest[0];
b = thisComp.layer("Roving Camera").pointOfInterest[1];
c = thisComp.layer("Roving Camera").pointOfInterest[2];


d = thisComp.layer("Jedi").position[0];
e = thisComp.layer("Jedi").position[1];
f = thisComp.layer("Jedi").position[2];


x = Math.pow(a-d, 2)+Math.pow(b-e, 2)+Math.pow(c-f, 2);
x = Math.sqrt(x);

(I’m using the Camera’s Point of Interest value instead of position as I what the layer Jedi to be fully opaque when the camera is in front of it rather than being on top of it. )

Now, what i did next was do another pythagorean distance equation, this time with a layer at the start position and the layer Jedi

g = thisComp.layer("Start").pointOfInterest[0];
h = thisComp.layer("Start").pointOfInterest[1];
i = thisComp.layer("Start").pointOfInterest[2];


m = Math.pow(d-g, 2)+Math.pow(e-h, 2)+Math.pow(f-i, 2);
m = Math.sqrt(m);


Now I’ve got two distances, the total distance (m) and the distance of the camera to the final layer Jedi (x)

I can express the camera distance as a percentage of the final distance

x = x / m;

x = x * 100;


And because I want the end to be 100% opaque, I subtract the total amount by the traveled distance.

x = 100 - x;


Now what we found was that we wanted to slightly see all the objects at the start, so I made a condition that the layer Jedi is always 10% opaque.

if(x<10){
x=10
}

Going from a static look to a 3D environment was a pretty big leap, and meant that we would have to look in to using software capable of dealing with it. I decided on After Effects, as I’m pretty familiar with it and have used its 3D tools in the past.

What is really cool about it, that i only really discovered recently was Expressions. Expressions are like little scripts that changes a layer’s property. You can reference other layer’s properties and there is a whole range of math tools to help you out.

For instance, I had a whole bunch of buttons for the DVD which I needed to see when designing, but then turn them off when I output. So I put an expression on each button-layer’s opacity that referenced the opacity of an adjustment layer. I could then change one variable instead of 30.

So thats a pretty simple example. What was more complex was my next brain-wave.
The DVD menus are designed so that when you go from one to another, its like you are going though into a different part – See this example on Youtube

What we wanted to do was, as the “camera” moved towards an object went from transparent to opaque. The way we did this was through an expression (special thanks to an old friend Stuart Evans, a math teacher at Heathdale Christian College).

Stay tuned for part 2…