Hatch

Have seen this Animation duo before and loved their work. Tiny Inventions.

Something Left, Something Taken- Trailer from Tiny Inventions on Vimeo.

Have been really busy with the BBC the last month working with Milky Tea on the production of a CBeebies’ pilot. We shot the pilot over two days in a converted barn down in Hemel Hempstead. It was a fab couple of days and I will post a bit later once we have got going on the project. In the meantime, here are a few shots from the shoot. It was a completely green screen shoot and was shot on DV Cam. Bit of a shame really as i was trying to convince the Beeb to shoot on HD progressive …. but the budget didn’t allow the extra cost for the pilot. Dave the camera man did a class job of filming and DOP’ing. Again, at a later date I will give a detailed breakdown of the shoot and how he lit the event.

Just been playing around with switching the Depth of field with the camera in After Effects. Basically just set up 4 type layers in AE and then changed their positions on the Z axis. I then added a 35 mm camera and turned on the Depth of Field. If you take the Aperture right down to Zero, all the layers will always be in focus and so you need to ramp the Aperture up a touch! Then just animate (adding keyframes) the Focus Distance in between shots.

To bring the animation alive, I added some textures and put together a music stinger just to signify the change in focus. This is referred to ‘pulling’ or ‘racking’ the focus in Film terms.

Depth of Field – Camera Test from the Hatch on Vimeo.

Here is a short 5 second snippet of a Stylized CCTV & type treatment for the credits to our short film ‘Vacuum’. I exported a frame from the POV (point of view) shot of the camera in the film and then took it into After Effects. Basically, I used  Video Copilot’s Twitch to create the havoc in the type and then used Video Copilot’s Riot Gear to add an old style film texture to it. In both the POV shot & the Film effect, I desaturated most of the colour and then used the Curves filter to create a high contrast texture for the Type to work over!

Vacuum – Stylized CCTV & Type test from the Hatch on Vimeo.

I thought i’d give this a mention is i’m currently in the middle of doing a heap load of colour matching. Colour matching a shot works particularly well when comping 3D sequence into footage. All 3D software will render out super clean colour which will never match your footage. A quick way to adjust your imported sequence to match the colour setting of your footing is to correct the Levels. Apply the levels filter to your footage, in your After Effects preview window change the viewing to only see the red channel. In the Levels filter change the histogram to only adjust the RED channel. Using the sliders on the histogram, make small adjustments until your sequences matches the tone of the footage its sitting in. Do the same with the BLUE and the GREEN channels, changing the viewing space each time, then when you flick back to the full RGB channel your footage should sit a lot better within its surroundings. Final tweaks can be done using the RGB slider. When doing any kind of colour matching or even composting, give your imported sequence about 4% blur (not Gaussian.. thats another story) as most footage will never be perfectly focused and colour tends to bleed between pixels.