FIRST FULL VERSION??!! After working for almost 60h on the project I'm getting a bit crazy. It's never-ending and yet it is (I hope, euhm?? Help?). What is wrong with me? Ok. Here is la piece de la piece again!
I'm proud to say it's a first 'full' version.
Alee, what I mean is, that I rendered it out completely for the first time, the full 6,28 minutes, as I'm reaching a kind of completion.
THE END OF THE UNIVERSE IS NEAR? As you can see I kept working on more variations of circular objects. It was hard to keep finding content and I'm starting to struggle to find proper objects and videos. I had to re-invent myself multiple times in the process. It felt so weird feeling all kinds of solutions popping up. One of the things I did, was expand the theme(s). I added two more themes: video games and errors. More about this and that in next episode! GRINDING VARIATIONS
I don't have a lot of new techniques to offer, but I'm going crazy on the ones I've already shown! Though there is always something different with each variation. That is a kind of beauty of the real!
How did I do this transition one might ask?
First of all I again masked out a circle shape from a very zoom in texture of a black hole. By zooming in I found a sweet spot where the circle gets some grain and some lighting/shadows.
Zoomed in:
Zoomed out:
Then I for example put a background of clouds or videogames behind it. I think it is a very nice texture. I love to play with these kind of things!
next I added this texture:
I scaled it down and changed the color into greenish by changing the Hue to 223° (instead of 0) with the Color Balance (HLS) effect! Next I played with the Blend Mode and changed it to Darker Color. Then I put this layer on top of our sphere. Next I also masked it out and sized it. Next thing I do is keyframe the opacity to let it smoothly appear and disappear. Magic isn't it? HOLY GUACAMOLY!
Who does not love guacamole?
Seriously?
What? WHAT??
Ah ok.
Lemme give you the recipe?
First you squash two avocado's. Be sure they are ripe enough! You need the right green for this video!
Cut some cucumber and tomatoes in small pieces. The cucumber is a cheap way to create a hell of a lot more guac for your hangry guests!
Finally squeeze some good fresh lime and - surprise!- a good amount of chili and mint.
OH NO! You forget some salt and pepper! add it quick!
Now take a photo of it!
Did you end up with this?
How did I achieve this holy guacamole?
Quite easy actually!
Here I cut out a guacamole bowl and masked it on top of the Mario background. To make the video more interesting it flashes sometime with another background the size of the bowl. For this I copy pasted a piece from another background and masked it where the bowl is (reverse), put it on top, cut it into mini slices and started deleted chunks in between.
This is behind the guac!
What a convenient recipe!
Mmmmmmm!
I liked the idea of the bowl spinning. I keyframed the rotation and fixed an anchorpoint over time to achieve this effect with a still image.
SHRINKING PEARL Another one that turned out great with minimal effort is this one. Here I took the pearl that was visible earlier in the video and made it shrink. This move fitted the background wonderfully well. I was amazed by the result.
To make it even cooler I added a color change hue to the pearl.
It is almost not noticeable, but makes a big difference in feeling and depth. In the picture above it even seems as if the light from the surroundings are reflected on the object, which is actually not the case.
Here some specs:
The video of the pearl I found also vibrates every now and then and gives this morphing patterns.
Check it out below:
Eventually I hope to also use this changes in texture to match it with the music, by cutting, pasting, copying, etc. I don't know yet, but let's see!
LEAD ZEPPELIN Another short thingy I wanted to show, is how to make this kind of imagery.
Also here it was me playing with some parameters and checking some effects out, before coincidence made this elegant creature step forward.
The original images:
They come from a video I found in this free archive! https://archive.org/details/stock_footage?query=zeppelin&sin=
It did not have some much stuff I could immediatly use, but I'm sure I should try to scoop up some free content here for my next project(s).
Seriously, you cannot imagine at first how difficult it is to find free re-useable content or content from the public domain.
Anyhow. This zeppelin seemed so intriguing to me, that I had to use it without any doubt. I was looking for UFO clips, but could barely find royalty free ones. A zeppelin resembles this feeling of an UFO like a glove!
Here is the full video for the fanatics:
I then blended it with this image:
It originally looked like this cute little wormhole:
To change its orientation I used the transform effect. I played around with the skew and skew axis to get the shape above.
As you can see I did not change the blending of this layer.
This layer forms the bottom layer of this composition.
On top of that layer we put the zeppelin.
Then we change the blending mode of the zeppelin layer to Hard Light blending mode.
Eventually you get this neat and fresh effect on both videos.
THEY SEE ME ROLLING
Last small recipe on the menu is the rolling walnut. Let's start cooking!
Only thing I want to note here is that I was trying to experiment more with the rrrrrrotation effect, but it did not seem to work the way I wanted.
Something I still need to figure out is how acceleration works. How can I keyframe acceleration in rotation. Now it just rotates at a certain speed depending on how many times in a second or minute the thing needs to rotate.
Maybe I'll find it out later, idk :3
Here I also masked the walnut on top of the background. Next I changed the rotation effect of the walnut with a fixed anchor point. It is really easy and is very similar to the holy guacamoly. I do see improvement in comparison with it :)!
Another experiment where you see a similar thing happen, is the rotating Yin-Yan sign.
A FINAL PEPTALK FOR TODAY
With this short analysis I hope to have covered most of the basic techniques and experiments I've been pulling through. It is all still very basic and I feel that sometimes I should just switch to Adobe After Effects to do some easy and difficult things better with less effort. Maybe for my next project I should dive into that!
In the next episode I hope to start finetuning. I also want to explain more of the narrative, my quest to fill 6.38 min with A LOT OF CONTENT.
Hope you are still with me
We are gonna make it!
Together! (Rick from Walking Dead reference, y'all ;))
Never give up!
Never!
XOXO