Alvin Seah
Forum Replies Created
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[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 -
No problem, Chris. Keep asking 🙂
[Chris Smith] “How was the design and technical approach? Did you guys plan on a look before hand, think of the elements you want then assign them to each member in some fashion? Or did each person say work on their own elements and they were all placed together in AE to see how they worked together? What I mean, was: Was it designed very specifically from the front end or was there a lot of experimentation?”
A little bit of both. A certain amount of planning was done to layout the structure of the video. This is to ensure that everyone stays on the right track and not fly too far. The art direction and the tying elements were pre-determined so that there will be uniformity throughout the video. And the rest is just experimentation. A lot of things didn’t turn out like how we planned, but they still looked good. We had to constantly communicate during the process so that we know what each of us are up to. Some of us didn’t exactly follow the plan but we accomodated and worked around it. I guess there is no right or wrong way to do this, as long as it is efficient and it works 🙂
[Chris Smith] “Like at what point do you say we need rhinos and giraffes for example? Or was that something somebody was working on and you guys incorporated it into the project?”
It was a last minute decision. Someone did some animal animations before but they were never used, so we decided to adapt it into the video as an enhancement.
[Chris Smith] “Does each person have their own specialty? Like one person is the Maya person, the AE person, or the PS and Illustrator person?”
There is one Maya person and the rest are all AE + PS + AI people.
[Chris Smith] “What inspires the things in the composition? Do you guys create or find photographs you like, mask them out them throw them in the mix?”
We listened to the song as asked ourselves what we saw visually. Instead of analysing the lyrics, we tried to inject our personal emotions as visual statements into the video. Having that sketched out we then proceeded to look for references or photographs to illustrate the idea on the board. Some of the ideas were thrown in along the way. Some of them didn’t make it into the video. For example the Flying Stompboxes, it was inspired by one of the band’s t-shirt designs.
[Chris Smith] “What was the camera animation approach? Did you actually animate the AE cam or were all the objects parented to a common layer and moved past the cam?”
Depends on the scene. For the first chorus, the layers were parented and animated because the idea is to “morph/shift” from one shot to the other without doing much straight cuts. As for the second chorus, the AE cam was animated and everyone else basically stood in their own places. And the other parts were a little bit of both. I guess it really depends on the composition to determine which solution would be most efficient.
[Chris Smith] “It seems the video is broken down into sections (as opposed to one loooong comp). Is this so? And how did you decide what defines a sequence? Did you create the cam moves first, then fill the scene, or set some key elements, then animate the cam?”
Yes, it is broken down into sections, then broken down to even smaller sections, and even smaller sections, and so forth. Some of them are music dependant (lip-sync) and some are not. So we had to be careful when determining the timing of each scene and its flexibility. We’re all musicians or music lovers so there is a basic understanding of song-writing which we translate into the video. Things like crescendos, climaxes and anti-climaxes were identified in the song and simply re-enacted in the video according to our own vision. So according to the pace or mood of the part in the song, we decided how things are going come in and go out. Some key elements were set and then we animated the cam, then more elements were set and more cam animation and so forth. If it doesn’t work, we go back and readjust until we’re satisfied with the sequence. Once the flow is set, we fill in the supporting elements like the particles, lighting effects, smoke and what-nots.
[Chris Smith] “The Background layer(s): Was it in 3D space as well or did you keep it in 2D so it was always there despite how the camera moved?”
Now this is a tricky thing. If it is in 3D space, it has to be huge enough to cover the comp, but at the same time still look good at certain angles or close-ups. If it’s static 2D then it doesn’t gel with the 3D environment. Our solution was using a little of both. The background piece was 2D, but manually animated to interact with the cam movements and to match the composition. This serves as a useful secondary animation as other supporting elements like the sun-light flare could be parented onto it. Then there are layers of textures and colour gradients which just sit there as static 2D layers.
I hope that was useful. Most of the solutions I’ve shared were imagined and results of trial and error. Under the pressure of tight schedules, we were forced to come up with the most efficient solutions yet not compromising the quality and I think that’s the best way to learn 🙂
Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com -
[Tim Klink] “Maybe this Tutorial helps you: ” target=”_blank”>https://www.ayatoweb.com/ae_tips_e/ae21_e.html”
Ayato does great tutorials. But I’ve never seen any of his work. Does he have a showreel/portfolio site?
Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com -
You have to be more specific. Are we looking at a close-up of the web? Or is it a long-shot? At what angle? Do you want to have it to spread/expand over time?
My best bet is to construct/animate it in 3D. In AE, Particular might be able to do the job. But still, it depends on how you want it to look like.
Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com -
Create an Adjustment Layer on top, apply GenArts Sapphire Shake, keyframe the Amplitude value to control how much you want to shake.
You can view the results here:
https://www.huevisualab.com/lmb.movGenArts Sapphire
https://www.genarts.com/index.htmlLove,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com -
Create an Adjustment Layer on top, apply GenArts Sapphire Shake, keyframe the Amplitude value to control how much you want to shake.
You can view the results here:
https://www.huevisualab.com/lmb.movGenArts Sapphire
https://www.genarts.com/index.htmlLove,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com -
Hi Chris,
I hope my answers are useful to you 🙂
[Chris Smith] “Is the building paint effects the prest buildings that came with Maya 6? Did you animate the growth functions to achieve their growth or was it more in-depth than that?”
Yup, it is Paint Effects. It was just keyframing the growth functions.
[Chris Smith] “I take it you modeled a rose and like you said, hand animated each petal?”
Yup.
[Chris Smith] “Would you say that the majority of the work was in AE where as 3D (Maya) was more of a support function to generate certain elements?”
Yes, that’s right.
[Chris Smith] “On your website is other great stuff. Like the video you did for Ahli Fiqir. Was that primarily AE?
Even the building walls shifting and the whole house collapsing into a book?”
AF was done primarily in AE like LMB. The shifting walls and collapsing house was done in 3D.
Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com -
Hi Chris,
Thanks. You’ve got some pretty good stuff at Sugar too 🙂
I’ll try my best to answer your questions.1. Was the footage of the band shot motion control or tracked? Or were they sepearate planes in 3D space and the parallax change was just the AE camera moving?
Most of the band footages were seperate planes in 3D space. There are some shots which were motion tracked. But the majority for the animation were created by the AE camera movements.
2. The Rhinos. Did you guys do the animation? If so was the camera data shared between the 3D app and AE. Or was it a “Locked” cam in 3D and the rhino layer is simply in AE 3D space and the AE cam does the movement?
The rhinos and all the other animals were animated and rendered in Maya, then placed in AE as a 3D layer. And yes, it is the AE camera which does the movement.
3. What was your methods of doing layer reveals? Masks? Ink spill footage? Hand paint?
It’s a combination of masks and ink spill footages.
4. Your methods for the text write-ons? AE Write-on or AE Stroke? Other?
It’s the good ol’ AE Write-on. Thanks to many tutorials available here on that.
5. Bird Flocks, Dust, B&W discs…Particular?
Yup.
6. The roses growing looks more authentic than just a mask reveal. Technique? Actual timelapse? Hand animation? Maya Paint Effects?
Each petal was animated manually in Maya. No shortcuts 🙂
7. Trees and Building growth technique?
That was Maya Paint Effects.
8. What was the hardest, most rewarding element in this project?
Getting together as different individuals, leaving our differences behind, tolerating each other, fighting with each other, laughing and crying. It was an emotional journey. Friends – that’s the most rewarding element in this project. 🙂
Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com -
Hi firtich,
Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed the video 🙂
All tracking was done with AE’s Motion Tracker tool.
The 3D elements was done with Maya and yes, towards the end of the video there is one scene containing 3D Stroke.Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com -
Hi Ron,
Thanks! hehehe.. we love cows 🙂
We took about a month to complete the video.
AE Podcast? Sure, it’ll be an honour. How does it work?
Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com