When I first started using Blender, I wanted to try out all the tools that I couldn’t afford to buy twenty years ago. Back then, a system to do what you can now do for free with Blender would set you back over fifty grand. In this project, I experiment with camera tracking to composite a 3D rendered effect over live video. Continue reading Basement Hole VFX
This behind-the-scenes video takes a look at the modeling and visual effects of the Sector 42 trailer.
I wanted to highlight a few of the cool tricks we used to create the sets and visual effects and a quick video seemed to be the best way!
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
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
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:
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.
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.
Post-production for the asteroid-themed space thriller (trailer) starring our daughters continues. It’s finally time to put the girls into the shot and the whole live-action thing is certainly the hardest part. In this episode, we’ll go over the live-action shoot and incorporation of the live footage into the 3D set!
We’re making a film trailer for an asteroid-themed space thriller starring our daughters and while it completes post-production, I’m telling the story!
Once the interior set was mostly complete, we turned our attention to the exterior shots of space. We’ll start with the starship model and its original metallic-flake candy paint, as well as go over how we made all the tiny little asteroids.
Ken and I put the girls in a space movie! Technically, it’s a space movie trailer but it was a surprisingly large project for just a trailer. Of course, we overdid it, but that’s how we roll. Here’s the story!
