Compositing and Special Effects

3/30/18 Week 1-14
Kamal Afiq [0330643]
Games Design
Week 1

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Introduction to composition and special effects

In our first week, we looked at a multitude of various title sequence and openings for shows and tv series. For my group, we looked at the intros for Westworld, Daredevil, the Defenders and Dark. What we noticed between all these intros is the heavy reliance for CGI, special effects and compositing to sell the show itself.

A major reason for using these special effects is to give an abstract summation of the theme and mood of the respective show. Music was also used to great effect to sell the atmosphere of the show. The visuals were also synced to the music to create a coherent visual narrative. We realized that the major reason for having an intro is to give the viewer's an abstract glimpse into the world of the show that they are about to enter, and the complex special effects used for the intro are a major selling point for the theme.

Learning After Effects & Tutorials

Over the next few weeks, Mr. Kannan then went over various Adobe After Effects tutorials and thought us a variety of ways to create motion graphics. In the first few weeks he taught us the basics of animating in AE, then using layer masks, then composition and using the 3D camera in the program.

Making use of what he's taught us as well as my own personal research, I produced the below animation as an exercise to see what the program was capable of. The logos were broken up into layers in Illustrator, and were then imported into AE as seperate layers. They were then animated using the basic options such as Opacity as well as a plethora of different filters such as Glow, Lens Blur, Motion Blur, Vegas, Liner Wipe and a multitude of other techniques used in conjunction.

I tweaked the keyframe values in the graph editor to make the animations smoother and more timely with eases, and played with the background using a combination of gradients with masks as well as light leak footage from a stock website. The final output was rendered out into MOV.

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Assignment I: Opening Title Sequence 

Our first assignment was to create a 30-second Title sequence for a Science-fiction themed show. I opted for a Cyberpunk-esque theme with a clean, modern aesthetic. My plan for the title sequence is to just show flyovers and closeups of a 3D scale model cyberpunk city, inspired heavily by the intro of the video game Brink.

For the purposes of pre-production, I've created a short narrative to give the whole project its own story.

• Centuries into the future, and the world is nought but a conclave of massive mega-factories and super corporations subjugating the whole under a noxious cloud of industry and excess. In a place that used to be home to wastes and salt-flats, now stands the biggest mega-city in the world. It is a place that is as technologically advanced as it is uncaring; as warring syndicates and techno-dynasties duke it out for the control of a city that is both untameable. 

With a roughed out setting in place, I can then start coming up with key visuals for a digital storyboard.

Moodboards for architcure and city layouts

Execution wise, I was thinking of having a CG scale model of a Cyberpunk city, and having shots flying through different parts of the city and landmarks. The show itself would be like a Sci-fi opera, and by highlighting the different places available in this shot through sweeping establishing shots and wide-angle shots. I've purposefully chosen Cyberpunk-esque music with a dramatic undertone to help get across the atmosphere of the show.

These are the main structures, buildings and landmarks. Smaller buildings and structures will fill the empty spaces.

The marked out areas display various landmarks of the city as well camera positions. The numbers indicate which shot it is.

To help with planning out the city and the shots, I created a rough map of the general layout of the city as well as its most prominent landmarks, as well as placed markers for where the cameras would be stationed. This is an early rendition of the city, but it serves to give a reference for the size and scope of the entire setting.

I also produced a storyboard/thumbnails, with shots that coincide with the above me to plan out the shots and camera angles I'm going for. For the music I'm using the track New York Memories from Crysis 3's official OST.

The shots are timed to the high-points of the music I picked out.

For the render itself, I intend to either use a blank white clay-like material or a glossy black surface for all the geometry. This way I can cut down on the amount of work I need to do by not having to precariously do UVs for the hundreds of buildings I'm going to do.

Silhouette concepts for the buildings

As for processing, I'm of having them done in Adobe After Effects; the text, lens blur, vignettes, transitions and others. For the editing, I'll have it done in Adobe Premier Pro in which I'll also do editing, composition and color correction. I might have to tweak the audio I've selection in Adobe Audition.

With the rough idea in mind and the aesthetic style planned out, I delved into Autodesk Maya and began building the city. The first stage was to produce the buildings themselves, which I initially roughed out using primitive blocks. I tried to come up with as many variations as possible so as to make the city seem as diverse as possible architecturally.

Rough shapes of the buildings in place. These buildings belonged to the central, downtown sector of the city.

With the blockouts done, I began to add another level of detail to the buildings by creating edge loops as extruding faces out of various aspects of the buildings to create overhangs, outcrops, decks and balconies.

The final level of detail for the downtown buildings.

With downtown's generic buildings done, I could move onto the outer reaches of the city and work on the shack town buildings. I wanted a city that was wholly made out of waste and shipping containers, so I essentially built up entire towers and high-rises using the same primitive shipping containers.

Alongside the buildings, I also made ground-level structures and villages.

The disparity between these massive shack-town buildings and that of the futuristic skyscrapers of the downtown area really highlights the stark difference in reality between the social classes in the city.

All the prefabs ready to go.

I then proceeded to create further prefabs such as bridges, walkways, industrial buildings, city blocks and filler buildings to fill out the terrain of the city. I can now start laying out the actual city itself. Initially I considered using Mash, but because I wanted a more realistic layout for the city I opted to hand-place all the prefabs myself.

The early blockout of the city terrain.

I first imported the earlier city map I had created as an image plane in the top view of Maya. I used the terrain chunk prefabs I had created to set out the terrain of the city, with the downtown area being the highest point of the city.

The completed terrain layout.

Terrain down, I started to hand-place the building prefabs and started blocking out the districts and avenues of the downtown area.

The downtown area.

The industrial are surrounds the downtown area.

After having done that as well as the shanty areas, I could finally start nailing down the finer points of the city where the camera shots will actually take place. I paid particular attention to the Spire, the trench areas, the gates and the docks of the city in the later stages of the city-building process.

The city more or less done.

A shot from the other side.

At this point it's just creating fine details and adding more complexity to certain parts of the city, that aside the city building-process was more or less done. In retrospect I could have done this a lot more efficiently.

To help figure out how the shots will work and the timing, I made an animatic that displays the rough camera movement and the timing.

With that done, I began thinking of how I could render the entire project. Initial Arnold rendering tests in Maya were to no avail, so instead I opted for Marmoset instead. Another reason Marmoset was the better choice than Maya's Arnold was the relatively quick rendering speed that gave me the opportunity to continuously go back, make changes and re-render scenes without too much trouble; the only obvious drawback being the lower visual quality a game-engine like marmoset has.

I merged my entire set as one object and brought the entire thing into marmoset as a large OBJ file, from there I began setting up the lighting and environment to see my needs. I changed the background to a solid green color which I could then key-out in post-production.

The scene setup in Marmoset Toolbag

Moving onward, I did some initial renderings tests and animated my cameras before carrying out the renders. Multiple re-renders had to be made because I wasn't satisfied with some of the outcomes. With the rendering done, I could bring the files into After Effects for post-production.

After having consulted with my lecturer, I realized that the whole product was somewhat visually stagnant; because of that I decided that the best way to bring some extra life into the title sequence without having to re-render sequences was by overlaying HUD motion graphics on top of the video clips to give them a more sci-fi feel.

Color correction and motion graphics were added in After Effects

Nested compositions, masking, adjustment layers, vignettes and a plethora of other effects were added to the sequence to make the entire video sequence more visually appealing and polished. After two weeks or so of pre-production (at this stage I was starting to fall behind) I finally finished the effects and motion graphics and rendered out all the shots as separate clips.

I opted to use Sony Vegas to edit together my final clips because the program was easy to use and make changes in.

 brought the final clips into Sony Vegas Pro and just spliced the shots together, brought in and timed the music as well as added fades at the beginning and end of the sequences. With that I rendered out the final project, and my opening title sequence was finally done. Below is the end result.

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Assignment II: Matte-Painting

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Final Project: Trailer

Our final project was to create a trailer for a TV show/movie that runs for 30-45 seconds. Seeing as the entire theme of our module was geared around a sci-fi or dystopian post apocalyptic theme, I thought I'd go for the later as I have already done the sci-fi theme for my first project. 

My initial idea was for a dystopian future where the world was engulfed in in ice and snow, and humanity has been driven to the brink of extinction, and constantly survivors must move from place-top-place to survive. 

For style I wasn't really sure what I'd be going for as I didn't know how I was going to go abouts it, so first I just took some visuals together to get an idea for the style. 

Lots of blues and whites are prevalent in a snow-environment

For the story itself, I thought of a couple of interesting plot points that could be used as strong visuals for my story:

• A group of people walkup a snowy mountain, when the camera zooms out the mountain is revealed to be a frozen ship
• Across a frozen lake, a man drags his injured companion on a stretcher across. The ice slowly begins to crack.
• Great avalanches of snow break of a mountain, which reveals itself to be a skyscraper buried in snow.
• A mountain-climber scaling a sheer frozen cliff, he slips and falls to a dark abyss below
• A survivor stands alone in a frost storm, spear in hand and poised for combat. Wolves slowly appear out of the frog and approach her.

For now I'm still trying to figure out how I'll execute the project, so my style will be greatly affected by my execution.

We were given a short demo on how to create environment concepts and thumbnails, and were tasked to create 10 thumbnails, develop 3, and clean up one. Below are my outputs.

Final output concept

• Wide panoramic shot, frozen skyscrapers loom by.
• Close-up shot of a frozen tree
• People and vehicles are moving across a frozen ship
• Medium shot of people a couple walking across a frozen lake, one of them is dragging the other across on a sledge
• Quick, underwater shot of the previous couple, the ice begins to crack underneath
• Medium panning shot of a skyscraper, people are seen scaling the cliff.
• Fast panning shot of people climbing up a hill, the camera hovers up as a large, lit city looms in the distance.

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Final Project: Composition

After consultation with our lecturer, he informed us that we were redoing the final project as we haven't had a proper focus in the past few weeks on what direction we were to pursue with the final. As such Mr. Kannan said we could redo our assignment and that it doesn't just have to be a trailer; but any kind of composition as long as it had touched the topic on how technology affects humanity.