“Hollywood Holiday” – Love Me Butch Music Video

[Chris Smith]

[Alvin Seah] “No problem, Chris. Keep asking :)”

Thanks Alvin. Extremely insiteful. Okay, then last batch:

1. When using PS and AI, were there any techniques you did to better prepare them for AE. Specifically, did you break any images or graphics up into internal layers first so that they could be animated or masked individually in AE?

2. How much did you use the AE Depth-of-field?

3. You mentioned color grads and flares. Tell me more about how you implemented them technically. They obviously add a nice feel by creating subtle color shifts throughout the image. DId you have a specific transfer mode that worked the best for you. Did the color washes animate, or were they a static element? Were the lens flares actual lens flares or were they color radial grads too. They didn’t seem to have a lot of lens artifacts so I wondered if they were “balls” of color grad. However I think I saw a nice anamorphic style color streak in there as well.

4. Ink spills and other grungy stuff: Did you tape/film your own spills? In water or on to a surface? How did you implement this footage?

5. WHen you shoot band footage. Are you using tracking markers at all? Or since you plan on each member being it’s own plane in 3D space, not worry about it?

6. You mentioned you guys were into music. The camera movements on the Fiqir video seem to reflect this. The camera even seems to bounce on the beat as if we’re watching the video through the eyes of someone dancing themselves. How do you implement the camera shaking and bouncing? Is most of it in the camera’s keyframing or are you using rendered 2D shaking effects like what are offered by some plug-ins?

7. Would you say that all of you are good designers and artists? Or is there someone who is more of a lead art director that sets the design and the others are more technical? How many people worked on this project (outside of crew for capturing greenscreen stuff)?

8. Would you say that you relied on plug-ins a lot? Outside of Particular, was there any other 3rd party stuff that helped out? Knoll lens flares, shaking plugs, soundkeys? What would you say the percentage of working with AE built in tools to 3rd party plugs would be?

9. For your workflow, do you ever see the need to match the camera data between AE and your 3D app?

10. Do you use AE’s ‘orient to camera’ function much? You work with so many layers in 3D space I wonder if you ever feel limited by the flat planes (to not give away the wrong perspective). Do you keep the cam always pointed generally in one direction a lot or do you orient the layers to not show their flat side? How do you deal with matching perspectives amongst all the elments and make the illusion of depth work?

Thanks again, Alvin. I’m learning a lot and this can be a thread to refernce to from now on when ppl ask how some things are done 😉

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Alvin Seah]

[Chris Smith] “1. When using PS and AI, were there any techniques you did to better prepare them for AE. Specifically, did you break any images or graphics up into internal layers first so that they could be animated or masked individually in AE?”

Depends on the scene. Sometimes you need to break them into different layers to create depth when the AE camera moves. Depending on how much depth you want to create, you group these layers accordingly. Try minimising the number of layers as you would always want to work on minimum load in AE.

[Chris Smith] “2. How much did you use the AE Depth-of-field?”

Not much for this video. I personally prefer to blur the layers manually.

[Chris Smith] “3. You mentioned color grads and flares. Tell me more about how you implemented them technically. They obviously add a nice feel by creating subtle color shifts throughout the image. DId you have a specific transfer mode that worked the best for you. Did the color washes animate, or were they a static element? Were the lens flares actual lens flares or were they color radial grads too. They didn’t seem to have a lot of lens artifacts so I wondered if they were “balls” of color grad. However I think I saw a nice anamorphic style color streak in there as well.”

Soft Light works best for me but as you know there are many ways to achieve the same look with transfer modes. The colour gradients sometimes move, with the background, sometimes on their own, sometimes not moving at all – depends on the scene really. The lens flare was created with Knoll Light Factory. It’s pretty fun 🙂

[Chris Smith] “4. Ink spills and other grungy stuff: Did you tape/film your own spills? In water or on to a surface? How did you implement this footage?”

Yup, we shot our own ink footages, both in water and on surface. It was just normal Chinese calligraphy ink dropped into transparent containers and wet water colour paper. I guess this was the most fun part as there are so many possibilities to experiment with. Well, most of it didn’t make it into the video but they’re sitting in our ink footage library now. You should try it.

[Chris Smith] “5. WHen you shoot band footage. Are you using tracking markers at all? Or since you plan on each member being it’s own plane in 3D space, not worry about it?”

Yes, only for the tracking shots. We used simple red tapes to mark the green matte.

[Chris Smith] “6. You mentioned you guys were into music. The camera movements on the Fiqir video seem to reflect this. The camera even seems to bounce on the beat as if we’re watching the video through the eyes of someone dancing themselves. How do you implement the camera shaking and bouncing? Is most of it in the camera’s keyframing or are you using rendered 2D shaking effects like what are offered by some plug-ins?”

Yeah, we noticed that the problem with deeply composited music videos is that they lack the “live” feel because everything is so static and “keyframed”. Well, that also depends on what kind of direction are you going for. But for Ahli Fiqir and LMB, we needed that sort of “hand-held” feel to it to enhance the mood, at certain parts of the video only though. We used both camera keyframing and a camera shake plug-in to achieve this. Sometimes when what the plug-in offered looked too artificial, I would manually use the Motion Sketcher to “direct” the camera movements. It takes practice, but you have full control.

[Chris Smith] “7. Would you say that all of you are good designers and artists? Or is there someone who is more of a lead art director that sets the design and the others are more technical? How many people worked on this project (outside of crew for capturing greenscreen stuff)?”

Well, there was a lead art director making decisions on the designs but ideas and decisions were still made together with the team. I see us as a group of Art Directors. It was more of a role-playing thing. We take turns to art direct for each project so that each of us are capable to switch roles when necessary. There were three key players and one 3D support person behind this video. There were several other individuals who contributed here and there, especially on the supportive graphical elements.

[Chris Smith] “8. Would you say that you relied on plug-ins a lot? Outside of Particular, was there any other 3rd party stuff that helped out? Knoll lens flares, shaking plugs, soundkeys? What would you say the percentage of working with AE built in tools to 3rd party plugs would be?”

I wouldn’t know how to gauge the percentage of plug-ins used in the video. If it’s needed, then it’s there. I strongly suggest not to depend on plug-ins to come up with ideas for your motion work. Sometimes, try to use a plug-in to do certain things that they’re not meant for. But as far as the video is concern, it heavily depended on our art and design sense and Photoshop to visualize it.

[Chris Smith] “9. For your workflow, do you ever see the need to match the camera data between AE and your 3D app?”

This depends on how you want to execute the scene. As for me, I usually try to avoid using camera data because if things can be done fully in 3D then get it done in 3D, and if things can be done in AE, get it done in AE. However, we did use Maya’s camera data in Ahli Fiqir’s video, which required a lot of taming to do.

[Chris Smith] “10. Do you use AE’s ‘orient to camera’ function much? You work with so many layers in 3D space I wonder if you ever feel limited by the flat planes (to not give away the wrong perspective). Do you keep the cam always pointed generally in one direction a lot or do you orient the layers to not show their flat side? How do you deal with matching perspectives amongst all the elments and make the illusion of depth work?”

Oh yes! Thank God for “Orient to Camera”! Or else I would have to turn those layers manually one by one. I don’t keep my camera pointed in one direction, I move them around as long as the composition looks right. This is very obvious in the second chorus where I moved the camera from one band member to the other, while dollying around them. Matching perspectives? Hmm.. I guess you just have to understand perspectives to know exactly where to place your objects. In AE there are no perspective guidelines (would be good in AE7), so you just have to “see” it. One way to train your eye is take a lot of photographs of buildings and retracing the perspective lines with pencil and paper. But we do tend to distort the perspectives a little, to create that surrealism feel so that the video doesn’t look too life-like.

Phew! That was quite heavy wasn’t it? Now, I would love to read some “behind-the-scenes” thread on other music videos here. Is there a compilation here in Cows?

Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com