Saturday, July 26, 2008

Lights, Sabers, Sound

Here is a clip of completed shots of the Mallick-Vader duel. The sabers are rotoscoped and now we are adding sound effects to completed shots. The sound is in stereo but when fully finished it will be in 5.1 channel surround sound. The video has gone through a color correction. The aspect ratio of the movie is 2.35, same as the Star Wars trilogies.

This clip was presented at a Producer's talk at FVTV where we presented the state of our production.




Monday, June 2, 2008

An Army of One

Mark Van Slyke has the only clone trooper costume in the entire Chicagoland area so we have to clone the clone for our shots that involve the clone army. Thanks Mark for agreeing to do this. This is scene 41 shot 3. Yari'el and Jared are escorted to the office of Jedi Knight Web Mallick.

There are 3 layers to this After Effects composition. The first layer is the one where the clone commander is escorting the rebels. The second layer is the guard at the door. The third layer is the painstaking rotoscoped layer of the commander walking in front of the guard. This is a first pass of the cloning technique and there are some noticeable areas to tweak before making it a final approved shot.

There is no sound for this shot.


Tuesday, April 15, 2008

First attempt at bluescreen keying

Here is our first attempt at keying out the bluescreen behind the actors.


Saturday, April 12, 2008

First completed CGI shot

We have finished our first fully rendered and composited effects shot. The shot is of the Sarco, which carries Yari'el and Jared, being chased into the clouds of an uncharted planet. The blaster bolts were added with After Effects. The explosion comes from Detonationfilms.com. The foreground clouds were animated in After Effects. The Sarco and TIE fighters were rendered in Lightwave 9.2 and output to an EXR image sequence. There are 2 layers to each render, key and fill which are composited together in After Effects.

Screamernet, which is a network rendering program in Lightwave, was set up on our quad core machine. It treats each processor independently when rendering frames. Next, we will extend Screamernet to other computers on our intranet.


Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Lightsabers

191 frames of rotoscoped footage taken down in NuMI.




This is Scene 70 Shot 16. The footage was deinterlaced and then rotoscoped with Adobe After Effects. All that is left to do is add a contact flashes where the sabers clash. Once Scene 70 is fully rotoscoped it will be passed to the audio team for ADR.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Compositing


Currently we are working on a segment of the movie where the Sarco, Jared's ship, is chased by the Empire and eventually crashes on the planet below. We have about 50 GB of video to composite into this 22 second scene. There are several layers to be imported and adjusted prior to compositing. The planet is a layer. The ships are two layers each, keylight and fill light renders from Lightwave. The picture shows a composite of the planet, TIE fighter, and the Sarco. The exposure, brightness, and contrast are adjusted on each layer and then blended. The nebula background and blaster bolts are left to be added to the shot.