crop circles?

[Dan Lacloche]

Yeah. That’s what I couldn’t figure out. I can’t have the shot from straight above, it has to be around 45 degrees, maybe even 60 degrees.

What if I took a picture of the field from the top, full corn and then again with corn gone, then I took a picture of the field from the ground [sides of corn stalks]?

Then I could turn all the layers into 3D layers in AE, cut the logo out of the full corn layer, raise it up higher than the empty field layer, and take the side shots of corn stalks and place them perpendicular all along the edge of the logo.

Do you think that would look realistic? And the people will be a challenge too.

Thanks.

[David Bogie]

You should be able to search google images for aerial shots of both crop circles and cornfield mazes. This will give you a nice idea of what you can fake and what is going to look terrible.

Here’s what a corn row looks like from about 10 feet in the air:
https://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://farm4.static.flickr.com/3019/2640512952_6b0d6131a5.jpg%3Fv%3D0&imgrefurl=https://flickr.com/photos/11197122%40N00/2640512952&h=375&w=500&sz=239&hl=en&start=92&usg=__0i3l8A7wD3asXvgjBIiInpyS0K0=&tbnid=WosM9LpHCSrkAM:&tbnh=98&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcornfield%2Bmaze%26start%3D80%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26sa%3DN

images.google returned thousand of superb crop circle aerials.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Matt Richards]

I think you’ll find someone like sneaker pimps.. cut their logo into a cornfield.

” When the band were playing at the Pheonix Festival in 1997 (Kelli era) a cropcircle of the bands logo appeared in a corn field. It is documented in a book that mistakenly took it to be an authentic ‘alien crop circle’.

I’d mix it up.. shoot some real world and some CG.

[Mark Suszko]

I did this for a farm-related show open some years back, and all I really needed was the photoshop emboss filters. I took the logo/title as a separate white layer and used that to cut my pattern into the crops,to shich I added a transparent fill of the original green color, slightly lightened, then I layered some embossed selections back over the stack. My field was soybeans so I didn’t need as much height, for beans just an emboss with the correct shadow direction is enough, but you can select the section of the cuts facing towards the camera and use the wind filter to sort of automatically re-draw some cornstalks in one pass.

Then I did a slow DVE move on the whole thing to make it look like a helicopter shot, worked very well for what I needed.

To make a field from scratch, you could try using the “hair” feature in a 3D CGI program or a particle system as the basis of the cornstalks, these have the virtue of being able to move in a “breeze”.

[Hope Holmesby]

Hi there…

Mark S…I love your idea, and have made in PS a field and the embossed logo. Am new to AE and would like to implement the last 2 paragraphs of your post, and confess that I need to learn what DVE move is and how to do, and the ‘hair’ effect …. can it be done with a particle system in AE?

Is there any possibility you would be willing to explain?

Thanks so much…

Hope

[Mark Suszko]

heh, I still call every kind of screen move a “DVE” because I come from the time before AfterEffects existed, when if you wanted the picture to rotate or translate in xyz space, you used an Abekas Digital Video Effects box or similar gadget to make those moves. We actually couldn’t afford one of those, we used (still do!) a Pinnacle Alladin (last good thing they ever made, IMO). But you can do it all with AfterEffects, you just set some keyframes and move the shot around to your heart’s content. The easiest thing for a crop circle shot might be if you could get an overhead aerial view to start with, but when I did mine, I had an aerial shot from 45 degrees or so, and it still worked fine. I just keyframed in some rotation around a point along with a gradual, eased-in zoom, to make it look like a slow helocopter shot.

Now I don’t really know or work specifically with AfterEffects, so I don’t know how well the particle system for it works, ask one of the experts here. I am a little familiar with one of the better particle systems (ParticleIllusion) and I know it has some built-in grass-like effects that can likely be tweaked. I believe it will also work with AE. Trapcode has a plug-in that generates 3-d strokes, and if there is a way to generate enough little ones, say, using a cloud of dots generated in photoshop, or an expression, that could make you some swaying, corn-like stalks that could be made to move around a bit. Another thing to try would be card dance type effect from AE applied to an alpha’d layer of stalks cloned in photoshop, to create a subtle non-uniform wave move, like from wind… This is Eran Stern / Shaun Mullen territory I’m talking about now, not necessarily something a rank beginner should attempt…. but in my head, I think I can see how it could work… only if I tried it, it might take me a month or more to work it out…

In a 3-d CG environment, this would in some ways be much simpler to create, and then maybe composite into the real scene. Typically I think it would start with a “hair” generator, settings of the “hairs” tweaked to emulate the plants.

I’m thinking if you really are very new at this, keep it simple, do as much of it in photoshop as you can. Maybe break it into multiple near-identical layers, then while th eentire comp can have the fly-around move applied to it, you can independently keyframe the corn row layers in AE to create just a little waving action, enough to maybe blur the fake stalks in the front of the cut area so the effect is less noticeable. Best of luck, let us know how it works out.

[Hope Holmesby]

Thank you so much, Mark.

I really appreciate so much your taking the time to write all this out, even the personal/technical history bit is very interesting.

Yes, I will study this and see what to do.

Have made a nice PS graphic and will try all the things you suggest. Thank you so much for all your kindness….very very generous…

All the best,
Hope