Hi everybody, My name is Clinton Jones, and
Today we’re talking about special— Visual effects.
[BEEP] Today we’re talkin about visual effects
NOT special effects. That’s all the stuff that you do on set.
Like the pyrotechnicians: they’re blowing stuff up--
that’s a SPECIAL effect. Anything on set, anything practical.
We’re talkin VISUAL EFFECTS. [music]
Sooooo…. [laughter in background]
So compositing! Let’s talk about compositing. Compositing is when you take all of your assets…
you take your fake explosion, or you take your smoke asset,
or you take your magic castle background that you wanna
put into your video… You take all those layers
and you stack them on top of each other to make them fit the scene. That’s compositing:
taking all your elements, bringing it all into
one final, good looking piece of footage. [CAR ENGINE ZOOMS PAST]
Tracking is when you replicate and apply the camera movement from the shot on that
day to elements that were not
originally there in the shot. [TIGER ROAR]
Let’s just say that your footage is doing this.
And I need to tell the computer to just focus on this movement.
You choose tracking points in the footage and now that I have that data, I am going
to parent this element to that moving footage so nowwww… it’s blended into the scene.
Does that make sense? So with tracking you have 2D and you have
3D. 2D is when your camera is on a fixed point,
and it’s just tilting, panning and looking around.
It’s not actually moving in 3D space. A 3D track is when the camera is doing all
those things, But is also moving through 3D space, right?
Traveling through 3D space. Here’s an example of a bad track.
You can tell that it’s not “stuck” to the footage,
it looks very strange, very abnormal, like this thing actually isn’t here, it looks fake
It looks like bad, B-Movie kind of material.
Compared to a good track. In a good track, you shouldn’t be able to
tell what is fake. If it’s composited well,
and if it’s tracked well, the effect should be invisible.
So, rotoscoping… [sighs] Rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is when you manually cut out something
In the frame… frame by frame… for the whole shot.
And it’s very tedious. Very very very time consuming.
Let’s say you have a person, and you want to put an explosion behind them.
Your footage is only one layer, so you need to cut me out
frame by frame, to add that explosion behind me.
You need to make me a new layer in front of this explosion.
[TRIUMPHANT MUSIC!] Here is a good rotoscope.
You can’t really tell that they are rotoscoped out,
It just looks normal. The edges look clean, there is a bunch of detail there, it’s feathered
where it needs to be feathered… [SPACESHIP ALARM SOUNDS]
Keying! Green screens, blue screens. You are selecting that color, and saying
“Hey computer! I want to see everything but that color!
Just take away THAT color.” And you need a color that people are not wearing.
If you’ve ever watched weatherman footage, And their shirt’s missing? It looks like
they are just a floating head and some pants?
Make sure your actors are not wearing any blue.
If you, for whatever reason, can’t film on location, or if something’s too
dangerous… like in Jess’s Big Date, when Joey had to
be standing right in front of his car, which
was getting blown up, and glass was flying everywhere.
You just piece those two together, and the camera shouldn’t have moved,
And you get something that looks pretty dangerous, and pretty cool.
So matte paintings have been around for a very long time,
what people used to do is put up a piece of glass,
and painstakingly paint on the glass with a brush,
and actually get it there in-camera, and you composite it.
Now we are lucky enough to be able to do it in the computer.
You save out that image file, give it to the compositor, and they are
gonna take that image, composite it into the shot,
they are probably gonna motion track it if the shot’s moving.
All of these effects… all of these kinds of tools
are all used in the majority of most VFX shots. Then you got… 3D stuff.
You can model anything. Trucks, cars… Planes, tanks…
Whatever you can think in your head, you can model.
It’s like sculpting, right? And then you have texturing, which is essentially coloring.
You can simulate explosions,
You can simulate things breaking apart, you can simulate water, any sort of liquid
or fluid. Then you got particle effects… which are
tiny little points, Thousands, millions of little points
that add up to make water, or add up to make smoke, or fire.
Lighting! Just like we light here, now, with all these lights?
You light in 3D, where you can set up fake lights
that can do all sorts of different things.
Then you have rigging. And rigging is when you set up a character to move; you set up
all the joints and all the bones, and then you connect them all
so when you grab this part, the whole arm moves.
Once your character is rigged, then you can animate it.
That gets into character animation, which
is a whooole thing. I dunno how to do any of that stuff.
So working in programs like 3DS Max, or Maya, Blender, or Cinema4D… these are all 3D programs
where you can do a number of things. So that’s all the 3D stuff, there’s a lot.
We’ll touch on that stuff later, but this
whole video is an overview for you guys, so
now you know what tools you have at your disposal, and you can start looking up tutorials for
all these things, and getting good at all these things.
Um, we have links down below,
For tutorials and sites that we like. But yeah, the whole point is to tell awesome stories.
VFX is another tool for you guys
to tell really cool stories with. So good luck on your VFX journeys,
and your storytelling journeys, and I’ll see you guys next time.