Machinima & Compositing in After Effects

I have been getting so excited with the prospects of what is possible with After Effects this weekend has been great.

I know my last post was pretty boring, simple lightning effects with some exploding effects but this is really the first time I have built my own compositions with artistic license usually bound by the boring corporate monkey life that I am forced to live to pay the mortgage - &*%*&$?!!!

Anyway, got that off my chest, got The Kooks on in the background, a puppy dog on my lap who is watching every movement of the mouse cursor on screen quite curiously, I am sure she can read, and a successful (albeit only mostly) composite Machinima creation of my very own - my very first! Secretly quite chuffed with myself.

And on top of that I have successfully combined multiple effects, and I wont say mastered, but now I do understand each of them better by virtue of practice I am sure things will only get better. The key effect I needed was green screening (Keylight 1.2 in AE) to get rid of most of the look of second life and plunge my avatar (note UoN t-shirt I am wearing - kitsch!) into a bleak and dreary yet kinda shiny world of digitisation. I didnt want to remove everything from SL but rather I wanted to more B&W look with the ocean glow effect beneath and although I am not convinced I entirely understand how I did it, I did it. :P

I have also done some colour correcting and then composited two compositions together to create this (see movie below). I also needed to mask out the ID of my avatar which I just couldn't turn off in SecondLife. Another downfall to overcome. I also had to download some trial software to capture my Machinima action which was clunky and I am not the best at camera control in SecondLife so the footage actually is not that desirable either but in concept it is coming together. Masking out the ID title has left a nasty black hole which I am not sure how to get rid of as I had to change its layer propertie to Subtract to remove it but that has gone through the composited footage as well so it looks pretty tacky people, but I am getting there.



I just published and previewed the movie and it looked terrible! All gone to crud because of the smaller quality I exported out of QuickTime Pro so I have had another go on different compression rate setting but I cant promise you it will look much better! If I had much more time I would fix this right up and export it at a much higher frame rate and post it to my YouTube page but right now other things are calling me away from the darkness of my studio/office/room/computer...