3208 Doodlez

So here goes. I have not blogged in a very long time about the Final Project and there has been quite a lot of changes that happened to the 2 darling videos that me and my teammates worked so hard to create. I'll break it down into two parts to quickly summarise the things we did.

Video 1: Creating New Magic

- Had a change of heart about the whole idea for this video. We decided to go with something a lot simpler and related to CNM instead. The main reason for this was due to the limited amount of time we had to edit the clips from the first video plus filming the narrator scenes starring myself. I did not have enough time to edit and neither do Jalea or Sharon. So we had to scale down our idea pretty quick and come up with something simpler.

- Got this cool idea to use the slogan that we created for our CNM revamped website, "Creating New Magic" and we created a video that showed clips which are 'otherwise' considered to be magic, except that we created all of the effects using After Effects.

- It turned into a 1 minute video that shows different parts of NUS but with a CNM 'magical' twist to it. The effects we put in varies in type. Sharon did the Fireball effect, Jalea did the sketchy road effect, and I did all the rest, including the rendering of the entire video.

- I used Video Copilot's plugins such as SureTarget 1.5 to create the overall flying effect of the words and videos. Had a particle simulation in the background. Then for the most part, the effects I did later on were a mixture of presets and a lot of effects put in. There is a lot of motion tracking throughout the whole video as it requires the effects to look in sync with the video movement. Plus, I tried as best as I can to make them look as realistic as possible.

- Problems faced: THE RENDERING. It kills me to see the rendering failing on me time and time again. I had to have faith that it will work everytime, even if it failed after 19 seconds into the clip. -_- It was so troubling! Arghhh... But alas, the 15th time was a charm for me (after having After Effects crash on me for about 5-7 times in the past 4 days). I had to redo huge portions of this video simply because I did not anticipate it to crash on me at particular times. So thus, a good deal of work was not saved each time. Yep. I basically had to rebuild the video from scratch using bits and pieces from other project files.

- One solution I found out to work on the video was to render the different effects individually first and then add in the .avi clips into one main composition together with the background and particle effects. Easier for me to modify the video and I realised that my chances of successful rendering are a lot higher. :) So win-win for me. Yay!

Video 2: Game Show (Making Choices)

- This video follows exactly as stated in the pre-production documentation. So I guess I'm quite happy with the result since it all went as planned. It exceeds a bit over 3 minutes but I feel that it's not too laggy or anything. Sharon helped to organise the clips from the greenscreen session and Jalea organised the clips from the flashbacks. I patched all of it up together in the end.

- I keylighted all the greenscreen clips as best as I could. It's a bit rough but it's the best I could do in the short period of time I have. Used a lot of masks to hide the imperfect portions and used a combination of simple choker and matte choker to smoothen the edges. Then, I added in the respective backgrounds. I asked Jalea to design then in 5 different colours, one for each of the characters in the video. I felt this is appropriate as it can reflect a bit about their character and personality or to simply differentiate them from one another. Plus, it looks nicer.

- Most of the music came from danosongs.com, created by this very talented guy called Dano I think. Royalty free of course. It was a tough job sorting out the audio and putting them in proper decibals because the RAM preview in After Effects is super laggy and ridiculously slow to the extent that It is very hard to even put preview audio and clips together. So I basically worked 'blindly' throughout the whole process of video editing, just praying that the audio turns out right.

- Problems: Other than the huge problem I talked about earlier, RENDERING is still a huge problem here. BIG BIG problem. It took me nearly 20 tries to get a successful rendering. As usual, my com crashed a few times while trying to do a RAM preview.

Ok, so I feel that this entry is turning out to be a very long one. Hmmm... Will be embedding the videos up here later.