Computers need updating

Cant do my trailer

As you may guess by the heading and title, I was unable to do any after works or additional tweaking to my trailer because the software at university is out of date meaning I cannot open my project. So I took this opportunity to add the finishing touches to the DVD cover and DVD sleeve.

DVD cover

So the logo was done and all i needed to do was put it on a disc. I already had a basic template saved with the guides for the bleeding edge for both the inner and outer circle. My original plan was to leave the disc blank and have it as a solid fill background, but this would have been too plain and depending on the colour, could have made placing the logos difficult so I decided against it.

Instead, I selected an image that matched the theme of the trailer and sleeve. Form here, I created a circle to match the diameter of the outer most circle and used that as clipping mask. The original artwork was designed at a slight angle so I rotated the image slightly to make the appearance seem more straight in appearance.

The background of the DVD

The next thing was to add the text to the path of the disc on the inside of the bleed. I originally did this first so I had the path on a separate layer with the guides. I made the text a small white font that was easily readable as this is what all other DVD images had.

The small print text on the DVD

The final two pieces to do was add some logo's to the disc and the title of the movie. The first layer I did was the logo's where I found an age rating and DVD logo and placed these both on the left of the DVD, The reason for the right side is because most western region DVD's have them on the right as people read left to right, with the viewer likely to see the production company first. All that was left to do was copy my logo and scale it down so it would not cover too much of the artwork.

Once this was done I created a new layer and created a sub layer for each text. I used the same font style as the DVD sleeve for continuity as well as a similar shade of red. Once the text was positioned, the DVD cover was officially done.

The finished product

With that out of the way completely, it was time to finish of the DVD sleeve.

DVD sleeve

With the sleeve, there really wasn't much to do. I got the same logos from the DVD cover and re sized them and added them to the spine. I was going to add them to the front cover of the DVD too but after looking at other covers for reference, I decided against it as it seemed a bit too excessive. What I did notice though is that a lot of DVD sleeves have the logo on the spine as well as part of the front image. Unfortunately I could not do either as both the logo and image appear low quality and unrecognizable, so i opted to add the logo to the opposite side of the sleeve. With the logos in place, the sleeve was done.

The finished product for the sleeve

All that is left is the trailer. Oh the joy of after effects combined with a lack of experience.

Not quite there yet

Tweaked the movie a little more

Today was not much of an eventful day. It primarily consisted of watching tutorials and searching for special effects to use in the video. I did attempt to add an explosion to a couple of scenes but the appearance was off and will need more research to make the appearance match the footage. But I did add a speed blur sequence and here is how.

Running at super speed

The original plan was to make a shot where it looks like I teleport but I needed extra effects such as sounds and animations, which costs a lot of money. So the path I took was to mimic super speed. The first thing I did was re shoot some footage of me about to run and me arriving at my destination. I then took the footage and selected a short sequence with me about to run. I then cut three frames of the scene without me in it and added a clip of me arriving at the end point.

From here I copied one frame of me about to move and placed it above the original scene. I then added a 16 point garbage matt and placed it around myself. I then added another effect, directional blur. I changed the direction of the blur to horizontal, increased the blur length and positioned it to the point where I was about to run off. I then repeated the process for the exit shot and reduced the scale and positioned it to match the shot.

The sequence and effects add to the clip

The result was nowhere near as good as the tutorial I followed (seen below) but it wasn't a bad attempt.

Adding a cinematic effect

The last thing I did was add an adjustment layer to the whole movie, except the logo which I'll explain why in a second. I used a preset called cinema 2 to give the video a nice cinema look. But the footage I recorded had a wide angle and made some scenes look off. So I used another preset which can remove the wide angle lens effect from the go pro and did this to all of the recorded clips. And finally, the reason for not using the cinema adjustment layer was because it made the logo appear to dark and not as good as the export was.

Next task, adding a fireball to my hand, some explosions and replacing the background for a clip. All in a days work

Back to the drawing board..... literally

Still my own worst enemy

After thinking I was happy with my sequence so far last night, the plane was to continue watching tutorials of after effects as well as picking up a few tricks for premiere. This wasn't the case. While going through a tutorial, it was mentioned that after effects got its name because after all the footage was edited, that is when you add the special effects. So with that in mind I went back to premiere to finish editing the footage in premiere so it was ready for after effects.

But as I was going through the footage I realised that I was only happy with about a third of it so I pretty much started again. So here is what I did, again......

Tweaking the first 18 seconds

So the first 20 seconds of the video were pretty much exactly what I wanted so far, and all that was left to do was tweak a few things. The first thing I had to do was to add a fade to a piece of audio so that another piece could play and it would seem like a transition of sorts. After searching under Audio Effects for a gradual fade, I had to settle for exponential fade under audio transitions. I didn't want to select this one as the fade was too quick but it was the closest I could get. All that was left for me to do was set the duration and position it correctly.

Editing the position of the fade

After that was done, all that was left was for me to speed up the duration of a clip I previously added to make it appear more fluid in the movement of the camera.

Increased the speed until I got my desired result

Once all that was done, it was a matter of selecting the clips again from the footage I shot.

Selecting the correct clips

When it came to selecting the right clips, I did things slightly differently. I selected the clips based on the audio. The reason behind it was because the first time I tried to place the audio over the video which did work to an extent but wasn't as good as I wanted it. So this time I decided to select the clips and base them around the audio which looked a lot better.

I trimmed the audio down to about 45 seconds because the whole track I selected was an hour long. Once I marked the in and out points of the audio, I dragged it down to the sequence just after the 18 second mark.

So the first thing I wanted was to showcase my logo at the start of the trailer, similar to what a lot of production companies do. So  I added the logo to the sequence and shortened it down to 2 seconds as any longer seemed a bit excessive. But I wanted to give the transition from the previous clip to the logo a professional look so I added a transition called Film Dissolve which gave it a nice transition slowly fading the previous clip while slowly revealing the logo clip. The one problem I had is that when the audio started there was a slight delay from when it actually started. So I shortened this in the clip. But I ran into another slight problem, the audio just started loud with no build up. So the way around this was to add another audio transition called Constant Power. This started the track softly and went to full volume.

The audio transition really helped the quality of the trailer

As you can see from the image above, I included another transition to go from the logo to the next clip in the sequence. Because of the short duration of the logo, I moved the majority of the transition to cover the clip . The clip itself I edited the speed of the clip and edited the size so that it would with all the other clips on the sequence.

Making a clip seem dramatic

The rest of the clips followed the same process of adding various transitions and editing the speed of the clip to give a slow motion effect or to speed them up so other clips could be added to the sequence.

There was one clip where I rose up from the ground and turned around looking. The part where I looked around happened a little too fast. So I played the clip to just before the point where I turned my head and moved forward a frame at a time until I got to my desired position. I then cut the clip in half and slowed down the clip and shortened it slightly. With the music playing, it gives a dramatic feel to it.

Creating the end

I had the clip to end the trailer on and added a fade to clack transition to give it a professional look. I also applied a fade to the audio as well but found it was too short. I selected the transition and opened the effect controls in the source window and extended the duration to match the transition of the video. But it still wasn't good enough. It didn't give the title of the movie and the last key bit I was missing was adding text to a clip. So I added a picture after the final clip and then when to create a dynamic link to After Effects. In after effects, I used adobe Bridge to browse the preset animations of text and selected one that seemed appropriate to the trailer called teleport. After changing the font, size and colour, I saved the project, closed after effects and moved it to the end of the sequence so that it appeared on top of the picture. I edited the duration so it matched the duration of the picture and then added a title that was 2 seconds long with the text "coming to DVD soon".

The end of the sequence is complete and so is the initial editing

The movie is very near complete at this stage. All that is left is to edit some clips in after effects, add some explosions with the use of chroma key, replace a background for a clip and then export it. Not too bad for two days work.

Its SHOWTIME!!

Yeah, lame title but you get the idea

After the surprising success of my DVD sleeve project, it is now time to to tackle the trailer. I have as much experience as everyone else but I always want to push myself to see how well I can do, such as the Illustrator and Photoshop tasks so this is no different. So here is want I have done so far:

Making the initial timeline

The very first thing I had to do was gather the material I wanted to use. Since I changed the sleeve from game to movie, it did make it slightly easier for the trailer. I recorded some of my own footage and downloaded various audio files to use. So after I had imported all of the files into separate bins, I dragged a video straight to the timeline and delete it. The reason for this was so that I could have all of the footage run at a consistent frame rate and so that I also had the correct settings for the footage I was using.

From there, it was just a matter of watching each video and dragging just the video only. There was a lot of initial editing with adjusting the length of the video and in some instances, speeding up clips to make sure the entire trailer was under 1 minute. From here, I laid a few audio tracks down and had a few overlapping to give me the effect I desired as seen below:

The sequence so far

With all the initial audio and video in place, the next step was to add special effects using after effects. So now would be a good time to quit the blog for today as I will have to continue reading books and watching tutorials.

Projects done so far

In my previous post, I stated that all that was left to do was premiere, so What I thought I would do is put all of the projects I have done so far and put them in one handy to view post instead of going through the list looking for them.

Illustrator logo

The finished Illustrator logo

Photoshop sleeve

The (nearly) finished DVD sleeve

Two down, one to go

This is pretty much done

The DVD sleeve is about done

After slaving away at books and scouring the internet for the perfect pictures and watching multiple tutorials, the artwork is finished. Barr a few logos that need to be placed. So here is a comprehensive run down of what I did.

Credits and screen shots

The first thing I did was a bit of a short cut as I really didn't have time to type it all out myself. I cut the credits from the bottom of the DVD case of the shadow figures and pasted it at the bottom of the case. The images I did a little differently. On my very first update, I already had these in place and I did this by dragging the files in from a folder and resizing them against a black square. At the time, I did not know I could manipulate the shape and change the layer from a smart object. I kept the images in the same place as the concept as the plan was to have an image to the right of the bottom one and left of the top one. This has changed slightly and will detailed below shortly.

Rear character

The rear character was a little tricky for what I wanted to do and I followed a tutorial for the most part. The tutorial I followed is listed below but I will list exactly what I did.

The first thing I did was use the quick selection tool to select the character. I was being very careful to select all of the character except for his claws as I did not need those. I then duplicated the selection to a new layer, called it effect, added another new layer and placed it in between the previous layers and painted it white with the paint bucket tool.

I duplicated the effect layer and called it jackman, went back to the effect layer and selected liquify from the filters menu. In the liquify menu, I changed the brush width to 350 pixels initially and changed the brush density and pressure to 100. I then proceeded to stretch the image over to the right while constantly changing brush size to get the effect I wanted. Something similar to the tutorial, but not quite the same.

At this stage I selected the effect layer, created a mask and painted it black. I then selected the jackman layer and created a mask for that layer. From here, I made sure the mask was selected, I then selected the brush tool and changed it to a different tip to one that I downloaded. From here, I somewhat knew what to do and started to click different areas of the picture with different sized brushes and different angles so it didn't look like a pattern, like the video demonstrated.

After I was done making the white particle effect appear, I then selected the black mask on the effect layer and repeated the same process. To finish the image off, I added some CG fireballs and changed the opacity so the characters hands could be seen as if they were being conjured from his hands. This was the finished result:

The finished character which I am VERY happy with

There would have been screen shots as I was going along, but I got carried away with the tutorial and completed the image without taking shots in stages.

Adding text and that's pretty much it

The original plan was not to have text, but two pictures instead. It may have looked good in theory but looking at actual DVD cases, I decided against it as the text was a nice way to draw the viewers attention to the plot line and too many pictures could ruin the case. I made up a description but was very careful in the font used. I chose Arial Regular as this font is widely used among computers and would prove very easy to read to most viewers.

I chose to include a tag line as most movies seem to have a tag line which tries to hook the person viewing the DVD to buy it. So I used the same font as the title but made it smaller so it could fit on one line. I then used the same font with a slightly smaller size and placed this on the spine of the DVD ensuring there was even space from the edges and leaving enough space for logos at the top and bottom.

The last bit of text I added was at the last minute. I was left with some black space at the top and decided to include some very short reviews that I had seen on the back of DVD's before. I chose to use a large bold font with a red colour as this stood out very clearly from the background. What I also did was add another, smaller font underneath with a company name and changed the paragraph to a faux bold to make the smaller text a little easier to read. So after many hours and much typing, this is the finished result:

The (nearly) finished product 

As you can see, This has turned out very well in my opinion in the space of three days from having to learn how to use Photoshop 3 days ago. All that is left to do is add some logos and the sleeve is officially done. Next and final project, and possibly the most ambitious, the movie through premiere.

Over halfway done

The front is nearly done, yay!

So the front is nearly done at this stage and after that is completed, all is left to is finish the back and this part is completely done. So on with the next bit.

Shadows and fire and text, oh my!

So as you may have seen, I inadvertently included some screen shots with the flames behind and or in front of the tripod. This was the next phase. As you have seen in the concept drawings, I wanted the tripod to have its leg in a building. But as you can see from the last update, I wasn't able to do that so an idea to cover it to give the impression that it is in the building is to cover it up with fire. Now the only problem I saw with just one layer of fire is that when I put in front of the tripod, it didn't look like the leg was in the building.

Doesn't look like the leg is breaking the building

So the only way around this that I could think of with time looming over me was to add another layer beneath the tripod and edit the levels again slightly. So I added another layer but after changing the levels, it didn't seem quite right. I reset the levels, changed the opacity of the flames in front and was left with the finished result:

Fire at the front and rear of the tripod

It doesn't match the image because the fire added is a CG quality picture and with a little more time and skill, I could have made it blend in a little better with the background.

Next job, the people

In the concept I had an image of two people standing in awe in front of the tripod and I still wanted that so there could be a sort of size comparison. I wanted to inspire viewer to really sympathise with the people in the movie (if it was real) how big the aliens were and to give them that sense of fear.

So early on, I saw a cover I wanted to use for inspiration and luckily enough, it had a shadow figure on the front. So the first task I needed to do was to cut the figures out of the image. This time I decided to use the magnetic lasso tool as this gave me a little more control over the edges and what I could and couldn't select. It wasn't ideal as there was not much contrast between the shadows and the rest of the image, but after placing them I was left with this:

The shadow figures but it caught the colours of the original image

Now the one problem you may notice as I did was that the cut also cut a part of the original image leaving a red outline around the shadows. Now an option for me was to delete the image, use the quick selection tool, create a mask and use the refinement tool to clean the picture up, but time is of the essence.

So from this stage I modified the Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation level which gave me this:

Finished shadow figures

If you look closely at the shadow figures, there is still a slight red outline round the edges of the figures which gives the illusion of the fire illuminating the front of them. So it actually worked out for the best.

Last bit for the front

As with all movies, they need a title. The title was already decided in the concept stage of the project. The biggest task for the text was making sure I chose the right font. I looked in Type Kit and Google fonts to see if there was any to choose from, but as you can imagine their selection is very large. So I looked through the list of installed fonts of Photoshop and found one I could work with and typed the title in a 60pt size. Here is what the finished front looks like;

The very nearly finished front

The choice behind the text was that I wanted something that was still readable to a wide range of audiences (Due to my interest in HCI) but I also wanted something that looked futuristic and alien like in appearance. The one thing I did change since the screen shot was taken was that I moved the text down slightly so that the picture of the lightning wasn't making the letter O of OUT hard to read. All that is left to do for the front is add the company logo and a few official ones to do with DVD Video and the front is officially done. Now to start with the back.