Call me Jazz @purpletigressillo - Tumblr Blog

Reflection

Overall I think I did pretty well with this project considering I've never done anything like this before. That said, there are things that I could have done better, or things I could have done to make the end result look better.

If I had photographed the characters with a high quality camera, things would probably look quite different, I could have lit the set better, or invested in buying some more desk lamps. That would have made the keying process simpler, and maybe I wouldn't have needed to resort to using rotobrush.

The animation itself was jerky at points, I could have spent more time ensuring each shot was similar to the last, but as I did this things got bumped without me realizing, including the camera, which also moved when the button was pressed. and some shots were grainier/darker than others which means shadows were cast at the time of the shot or the camera wasn't focused properly.. But if I do something like this again, I think I'll be more prepared and aware of the things that may impact the final animation.

I also could have spent more time on particle effects such as the static to make it more convincing, and done something more stylistic with the colour grading.

#reflection #soundwave and the tv #stop motion

Compositing breakdown

#soundwave and the tv #stop motion #breakdown

Soundwave and the TV

the completed project. See soundtrack posts for specific links to the sounds used.

#soundwave and the tv #compositing #final #stop motion

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All of the background sounds compiled together and synced. There's the base layer of ambient noise, which can be listened to separately in my previous post, and then all the footfalls which I recorded myself with the actual figures, made them 'walk' on the carpet and recorded the sound their feet made. And I dropped the soundwave figure many times to get the right sound for when he shuts down.

The rest was all from Freesound.org, a resource site dedicated to providing stock audio, generous folks have recorded sounds and uploaded them, free for anyone to use.

These are the sounds I've used for this compilation:

http://www.freesound.org/people/lolamadeus/sounds/161215/

http://www.freesound.org/people/m_O_m/sounds/103236/

http://www.freesound.org/people/RyukaRukario996/sounds/131708/

http://www.freesound.org/people/fordps3/sounds/186669/

http://www.freesound.org/people/bsung88/sounds/78948/

http://www.freesound.org/people/DJ%20Chronos/sounds/123113/

http://www.freesound.org/people/ljudman/sounds/33243/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Corsica_S/sounds/62502/

http://www.freesound.org/people/CGEffex/sounds/107005/

http://www.freesound.org/people/robstrobe/sounds/9070/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Halleck/sounds/19487/

http://www.freesound.org/people/noirenex/sounds/159399/

#soundwave and the tv #soundtrack

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This is the ambient background noise for the project, I needed to layer the sounds up like this since I have a limit of three audio layers in Video Studio, which was what I use to crop the sounds and edit their volume. I use Audacity for things like altering pitch and filtering out noise/static. Most of the hard yards regarding the soundtracks was done for the Animatic a few months back, so I just needed to fine tune and sync up those sounds to the final project. Most of the sounds/sound effects were found on freesound.org, a resource site dedicated to stock audio, generous folks have uploaded audio they've recorded, free for anyone to use.

There is some low volume ambient background noise recorded from my own living room throughout the whole thing though.

Sounds used in this compilation:

http://www.freesound.org/people/Argitoth/sounds/38970/

http://www.freesound.org/people/avakas/sounds/144114/

http://www.freesound.org/people/junggle/sounds/31248/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Sclolex/sounds/178231/

#soundwave and the tv #sound #soundtrack

Progress 2/11/2013

Compositing the finished/exported scenes all together now and things are much longer than they were intended to be. Project 'limit' is meant to be 30 seconds, I have something well over 40, however I always shot extra for 'just in case' reasons, and it won't kill the scenes to trim some off the edges a little. The colour grading isn't consistent either, but I was always kind of aware of that too, I couldn't accurately match them up without having the different scenes together, so I will need to make all of the necessary adjustments to that. The final thing I have to do is the sound effects, I have the base soundtrack from my animatic, but for the footsteps, static buzzings etc I need to time to the final footage again.

#wip #soundwave and the tv #stop motion #After Effects

After Effects does this weird thing where the view port/window randomly dissappears. All the layers/content is still there on the timeline everthing is still there but the view/preview window is all gray as though nothing is open. I have the exact same issue with photoshop. If I save it nothing bad happens to the data or anything thankfully. It's just a pain because I have to restart the program every time it happens...

#after effects #issues

Progress (1/11/2013)

the shadows are all done, I've gone through and animated the visor displays and done some blending with them using screens/overlays and gaussian blurs. I've done all the time remapping and fixing of jittery sequences. For scenes with faked camera movements I had to precompose the layers first, making sure the precomp screen res/size was larger than the main one so that there was room for those movements. I've done all the camera movements, colour grading and exporting ready for the final compilation, up to the scene where soundwave rears back in surprise, beyond that I'm still working on it.

Some techniques I've utilized is the blurring to make things come in/out of focus, I mostly blur the backgrounds so that the focus is more on the characters in the scene, but in some cases where the characters are very small, I've had to blur and add some noise so they would blend with their surroundings better.

I've added some lightning/static effects on this last scene, to go with the glitching/spazzing movements soundwave does, I could add smoke/steam as well but I think that's a bit too much? I'll try it anyway and see how it looks.

I've used a gradient blur for the background using a B+W ramp and the compound blur effect to help with the depth of field. I also needed to have some light casts from the static, so that electricity layer was duplicated and blurred, set to screen. duplicated again and set to overlay, and blurred some more. And as a 'clipping mask' I went and duplicated the character animation layers and filled them with black and set the layer mode to 'Stencil Alpha', which kept all the extra colour cast overlays inside soundwave's silhouette.

I'm hoping to have this scene completed by tonight.

#wip #soundwave and the tv #stop motion

I was playing with the various colour grading effects in after effects, I just wanted to warm it up a bit since it was only meant to be lighthearted, and the colours were too cool. Then I started figuring out how the colorama effect worked then things just sorta went off on a tangent... It was fun though! I started trying to get the colorama pallette the same as this lion king still.The screen shot above the still is the colorama effect without any blending modes, the last one set on 'hard light' with opacity reduced.

Nailed it.

#wip #tests #soundwave and the tv

Add Lightning / Electrical effects onto your video(s) using Adobe After Effects! Checkout my tutorial and see how to create this cool effect.

Apparently After Effects has its own electric/lightning rendering engine, so I'll just use that for SW's sparking glitch.

#tutorial #After Effects

WIP for the very last scene.

I'm not exactly working on these in order, fyi.

But they have shadows now, Instead of 3D-ing all the layers, I just 3D'd the shadows. They are created by duplicating the character animation layers, setting a saturated dark blue fill, Gaussian blur, multiply layer mode, 50% opacity, and manually keyframing the positions where the shadows look wrong. For this scene I had to keyframe the parts where Soundwave falls so that the angle/direction of the shadow changed to be underneath him. But in doing so Megatron's shadow also changed since they were photographed together in the same image, and his shadow doesn't need to change angle/shape. So I separated their shadows by duplicating their shadow layer, and masking out the characters to separate their shadows.

#soundwave and the tv #wip #stop motion

Progress (22/10/2013)

I have yet to start with the shadows the characters cast on the longer shots, my previous attempt involved 3D layers and duplicated character animations to form the shadows, but they seperated from each other after a certain point so that it made the characters appear as if they were floating.

Also successfully animated the text effects for the HUD scene, they're a bit rough but I'll leave it as is for now since there are 'bigger fish to fry'. I also reviewed the film I took of the camera movements, imitating Soundwave scanning the TV, at the time the gears in my tripod were stuck so the film jerks around a lot, I can't use that footage, I think I'll need to reshoot.

Slowly working through the stop motion animation and fixing any sudden repositionings, and also retiming. But I've been pretty flat-out with my other projects too, I'm not entirely sure I'll get this one completed in time, especially since with the type of footage it has, it needs a lot of additional time put into it...

#wip #stop motion #soundwave and the tv