Dave has covered the green screen set at Swan Creek Studios in his post Making a Space Movie – Live Action. I will walk through the process of how to extract the girls from the green screen so that Dave can put them in a space ship. The process of using a green screen to remove the background from the subject of a video or photo is called chroma keying. Continue reading Making a Space Movie – Green Screening
Monthly Archives: May 2014
Sector 42 – The Space Movie
Three girls on a routine space mining mission in Sector 42 encounter an unknown intelligence. What will it mean to the Corporation? What will it mean to humanity?
Our amateur movie project that began as an idea on January first is finally complete! It’s been five months of long nights in the basement but it was truly a terrifically fun experience and Ken and I had a great time doing it all with our daughters.
We hope that you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it!
We also enjoyed writing about it, so if you’re interested in the making-of, you’ll find our stories here:
Blog Posts
- Making a Space Movie – The Set
- Making a Space Movie – Exteriors
- Making a Space Movie – Live Action
- Making a Space Movie – Post Production
- Making a Space Movie – File Management
- Making a Space Movie – Audio Editing
- Making a Space Movie – Green Screening
Videos
Making a Space Movie – Audio Editing
After Dave and I got the movie roughed together and the visual effects created, it was time to put the audio together. We used Adobe Audition for sound effects and multi-track editing. There are three distinct steps to the audio editing. First is cleaning up the voice tracks recorded on set. We learned a lot about what not to do and used Audition to correct some of our mistakes. Second is synchronizing the audio tracks to the video, we used twenty-two tracks of audio plus the video track and master track to create the movie. The final step is balancing the audio mix. Audition gives you the ability to modify the volume of each track as well as the direction the sound is coming from (pan). Within each track you can make subtle changes to the volume and pan. Dave created an amazing music score for the movie that was mixed in with the voices and special effects.
The picture shows the interface to auction and some of the tracks. At the top you can see how we varied the pan (blue line) and volume (yellow line) of the space ship rumble track as the ship passes by in the intro scenes. The larger clip on the send line is the music score. Dave and I spent about a week tweaking the levels and timing to get everything so we liked it.
Making a Space Movie – File Management
During our five month adventure we created over 50 thousand files. To be fair, the movie was three minutes long at 24 frames per second and at some point every frame was saved as a separate file so even if we only created each frame once that is over 4,300 files. That would have been nice to create each frame once but we created each segment multiple times. The estimate of 50 thousand is probably low. Dave and I needed to come up with a system to manage the files as well as share them between us while we worked on the movie. Dave was working on a Windows machine and I had a Mac. We each kept our own file structure that worked for us. Dave set up a google share drive that we would use to send files back and forth. Some files were as large as 150Mb. My file structure contained separate folders for potential source material such as sounds, graphics, and poster ideas. Almost every graphic element was created by us. Some of the elements such as the logos and star fields were made in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop so they have their own folders.
The original footage was kept in one folder and the frames from each segment of the movie, as well as the completed video, audio, and animation, segments in others. I see a few folders in there with example frames for problems that we were working through such as image quality, masking, color grading and test footage. An early test included beaming my daughter out of our basement.
Motion Graphics – Mobile Avenger
My first amateur attempt at motion graphics, influenced heavily by Andrew Kramer’s ProScores assets and tutorials.
My good friend Brad, our awesome mobile developer and product lead, was leaving our small company after many years to take on a much larger leadership role elsewhere. We would all miss him and he was a perfect subject for a promo-style homage.
Making a Space Movie – Post Production
We’re now down to the final days of post-production for the asteroid-themed space thriller (trailer) starring our daughters. In this segment, we’ll talk about the final shoot, the interactive computer screens and how we put the whole production together.
