Effects

Progressing from what we have learnt in the Video and Audio concept sessions, we all agreed on having some scool effects in our sequnce, one of which being a portal that comes out and allows the real life character to walk through it and enter the 3D environment. Another effect that we wanted in our Animation was a blast that comes from the 3D character, like what happens in Mortal Kombat from the likes of Sub-zero and Dragonball characters. We wanted to incopoate these as they tie in nicely with what we wanted to achieve.

We began to look at different films to see how they present there effects in screen.

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This is an attempt of creating the hand blast using After Effects, the way in which this was done was by adding many solid layers on to the original footage, which allowed me to add a lens flare over the top whilst still being able to see behind them, we then tracked the lens flare with the movement of  the footage and then duplicated the layer many times in order to have the continal flow of the lens flare which looks like a blast.

Another effects that was done was rain and fog, which we could implement into our idea.

We then moved on to putting the real life character in to the 3D landscape, to do this we had to bring the footage in to After Effects then use the Colour Range effect which allowed the removal of the blue, and then a simple choker was added to remove the blue that was going around the character then we colour corrected this to make the background and the character look as though they have the same lighting.

The problem with this is that even though the character and the background match with the angle of the camera, the character still looks as if its just been dragged and dropped on it. To ridicule this we put a shadow on he charcter.

This looked much more realistic than the previous attempt with such a simple soulution.

We then edited the 3D model in to the environment the same way we dide the real life character, this was by rendering the 3D character out with a blue background which then allowed us to remove it quite easily then place a shadow on him the same way the real life guy was done, as well as adding the blast.

Portal test in Final Cut

We needed health bars and a count down to give more of a fighting game feel, there are a lot of fighting games about so we did some research into different styles of health bars and the types of fonts used for the count down:

We decided just to go for the bog standard green block turning red as the health goes down  like in the old Mortal Kombat games:

We created these in bars in flash and some simple tweening to make it look like the life was going down. Then we used a basic old school font that matches the simplicity of the health bars:

We decided to do the sound effects and sound track after we had put the video together so it would be easier to get everything to sync up. It was just a matter of getting the sounds we needed, punch and laser sounds etc. Then dragging the sound file into final cut pro and making it the appropriate length and volume. We got one of our friends involved with music production to create the sound track. We sat down with him and explained what we wanted and what mood the track had to portray.

 We edited the track so it dropped at the right time, when the voice says fight, and it all fit together very nice and the project was complete.

Dental Law Partnership (2004) Dental Law UK [Internet],Dental Law. Available from:<www.dentallaw.co.uk>[Accessed on 25 May 2012].

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