The Dreaming Machine

This week’s Adobe After Effects tutorial comes from the wonderful Videocopilot. You will need to shoot some footage of your own to complete the tutorial, and setting up a green/blue screen that’s large enough to cover the action is really the most difficult part, but the results are definitely worth it.

The tutorial uses step-by-step video instructions and shows you how to add effects onto video footage and simulate a car hitting a pedestrian. It takes place in a suburban street and involves a car driving along and slamming into a pedestrian from the side. The pedestrian falls dramatically onto the bonnet and is pushed along out of frame by the car. To add to the realism, the car bonnet crumples and you can even download a sound file from the website that helps with the illusion.

This tutorial can be applied to any situation, so long as your vehicle drives in from one side of the frame and out on the other side. It could be a truck or a bus, it doesn’t really matter because your actor is never in danger, so you can just drive whatever vehicle you have into and out of the frame.

When we tried the tutorial, we used a green bed sheet to replicate the blue screen, and two people stood on either side and held it, but because of perspective, it was quite small in the frame and our actor used a lot of movement in his fall and so parts of his body overshot the sheet and had to be masked out manually, because we couldn’t key them out. A little more time consuming, but it still worked quite well.

It’s also a good idea to use a tripod when filming your actor and don’t move anything when you film the blank plate so that the two plates line up perfectly.

Providing you are mindful of these few issues, it’s a surprisingly simple tutorial that produces really professional results. Once we had shot the footage, the effect really only took a couple of hours to impliment. The only thing that could take you a long time is extracting your actor from their background plate. It all depends on how clean your footage is and how well your green screen worked on the day. The technique demonstrated in the tutorial is clever, simple and effective.

If you need a road accident shot in your project, or just want to improve your keying skills, this is a great tutrial to try. We had a lot of fun with it. We hope you enjoyed our Adobe After Effects tutorial of the week. Please leave a comment.

From the hoop on Vimeo.

This week’s showreel is a great little animation from three French students: Remi Dessinges, Guillaume Fesquet and Anthony Arnoux. This is their graduation movie, made last year in Supinfocom Arles. It’s a suspenseful little number and very filmic in its style. The story is loosely inspired by the life of Earl Manigault, one of the greatest basketball players of his generation who lost everything to drugs. The end of his life was devoted to stopping children from Harlem walking the same path. He started the “Walk Away From Drugs” tournament for kids, and died in 1998 from heart failure.

You can see their drawings and renders and find out a little more about the film on their website: www.fromthehoop.com

The movie was made with 3D Studio Max 9 rendered entirely in default scanline (with an additional Ambient occlusion pass). They used Adobe After Effects for compositing and there is a “making of” on their website. Three talented graduates to watch.

Adobe After Effects CS4 has finally been released and is an essential, but expensive tool in any digital designer’s arsenal. Should you upgrade?

Here’s what Macworld have to say:

“After Effects CS4 represents one of the most significant and useful upgrades in recent history. The new version’s interface now integrates more seamlessly than ever into the rest of the CS4 suite. As the demand of most content creators and motion graphics producers increases significantly, it’s good to see that Adobe is still providing tools to help make the workflow easier and more intuitive, allowing the artist’s creativity to come to the forefront.”

Hear hear. I’ve ony just recently started playing with it, and getting used to the charcoal interface might take me a while, but the ability to import 3D layers from Photoshop is awesome and I look forward to the plethora of tutorials that will no doubt exploit this fact.

Here are six ways After Effects CS4 saves you time and money, according to Adobe.