Bunny Blog

Once upon a time, some guys calling themselves Team Lower Gatsby and some guys calling themselves Psychic Bunny (some of those guys from each actually being the same guys) got together and made an internet TV pilot. It was five minutes long and silly and made in about 5 days at a total cost of about $150. However, those guys, being ambitious tykes with poor judgment, decided to put all sorts of exotic locations and special effects in their show! Why did they do this? Who cares! The point is they did this all using the most run-and-gun tactics around, and somehow it actually came out looking pretty good, and some people on the WWW asked “Hey, how DID you do that?” and so here’s the brief tutorial. Enjoy.

First off, if you want to actually watch the underwritten, half-conceived show in all of its original, year-2005 glory, you can use the internet to do that! (Second off, if you want to finance the continued development of this series, we’ve actually spent some real time re-working the idea and evaluating our mistakes!) Now, on to the making-of!

Parking Garages of the Arctic Circle

It seems like the thing most people want to know about is the Russian submarine scene. We shot this scene on the roof of a parking garage. Seriously. We didn’t have the time or money to rent a real greenscreen stage, and couldn’t use the one at our office, so I used a technique I have semi-successfully done before - using the sky as a bluescreen! The first time I did this, I tried it completely as a joke, but it worked surprisingly well. This time out we didn’t have a lot of options, so this was it. There’s a big problem with this, however. You need a lot of uninterrupted blue. Here in Southern California, there are rarely clouds in the sky, so that worked out well for us. Elsewhere, or in other times of year, it might not have gone so well, and it definitely isn’t reliable. Worse, though, is that you can’t have objects jutting up into view. Mountains, buildings, power lines… those sorts of things are hard to avoid in the city. So we went up on top of the parking garage at the Arclight Cinema, which is about 6 stories tall and gives a nice sweeping view to the south. That was enough to get us above most of the muck of the rest of the city. We were still forced to shoot from a slight up-angle but it wasn’t disastrous. And that gave us a shot that looked like this:

Which we then surprisingly easily turned into THIS:

In this scene, Fisherman 4.0 has helped the Russians rescue a missing submarine. He’s really good at fishing, y’know? So that meant we needed a submarine. As a teenager, I read more than my share of Tom Clancy novels, so it was trivial for me to grab this image with the help of Google:

It’s displayed smaller here, but actually has a resolution of 1500×358 pixels. That was the most important quality I was looking for. The other quality I would ideally be looking for is “non-copyrighted”, but in this case I’ll admit I have no clue. Since our show wasn’t for sale, and since I suspect the photo comes from the U.S. Navy anyway, I let my normally stringent ethics (the result of a harsh Quaker upbringing) lax.

So now we have a submarine. But that submarine’s in the water, not the Arctic! Fixing that turns out to be incredibly easy using basic After Effects tools.

First things first: we’ve gotta remove the background on that sub photo. I brought the photo into After Effects and used the bezier Pen tool to quickly outline the actual shape of the sub itself, masking out the background that was there. I left some of the hull wake, because I saw it could easily be made to look like broken-up ice.

That’s good, but it doesn’t look very arctic, does it? We need to color correct it. This submarine will be in the background, during a light snowstorm, so it should be partially obscured. Easy enough. First, I applied Hue/Saturation on the submarine layer, setting the Master Saturation at -64 and the Master Lightness at +54. This made the sub go a flat, dull gray. However, it was still retaining some shadows and detail that looked out of place to me, so I also applied a quick Brightness & Contrast and set Contrast to -30 after a little trial and error. Generally I don’t use Brightness & Contrast because it doesn’t give you much control, but in this case it was the fastest way to get where I wanted to be. Which now looked a bit like this:

Now let’s put it into some snow-blasted hell. We need two things: ground and sky. I used the same technique to make both… the Fractal Noise plugin, which is standard with After Effects. It’s possibly the most useful plugin that has ever existed, so you should get to know it.

I started with the sky, since I knew that would be the layer farthest back in virtual space. Here’s what I did:

1. I made a new solid layer, full comp size.
2. I applied Fractal Noise to that layer and tweaked the values until I got something that looked like distant snowclouds. The basic settings I changed were to reduce Complexity, halve Contrast, and increase Brightness.
3. Within Fractal Noise, I keyframed Evolution to give the clouds some internal organic change and keyframed Offset Turbulence to give the entire thing a slow right-to-left movement over about 30 seconds (the most I thought I would need for this scene).

That’s it! Sky! The ground is the same, with two key differences: first, it doesn’t animate. Second, it needs perspective. Having ground of one continuous color looks fake, but so does ground that has disturbances of the same scale in the foreground and the background. So, from the top:

1. The ground was supposed to be snow and ice, so it needed to be brighter than the distant sky. So, within Fractal Noise I set Brightness at 45 and Contrast at 20, giving me something that was basically white, with a few simple gray splotches that could look like snowdrifts. Good.
2. I transformed the ground into a 3D Layer and placed it so it would recede into the horizon. However, now my ground didn’t fill the frame!
3. What I really needed to do was enlarge the ground layer. But making the layer itself larger would mean more for Fractal Noise to render, and that would drastically slow me down. Since this was background and could look soft anyway, I simply scaled the layer up by 250%. It looked pretty good, so I called it done. Note that you do lose resolution doing this, though, so in many cases it’s simply not acceptable.

And now we a digital matte painting that actually looks pretty good. Total time to make it so far: less than an hour, including the time spent on Google!

Now that we have the basics down, we need to add some of those details that will really sell the shot. First, what’s an arctic snowstorm without snow? I added two layers of snow using Trapcode’s Particular, which is the best, fastest, most delicious particle engine available for AE. Wholeheartedly recommended, along with all of Trapcode’s other products. I used two layers, one for mid-foreground snow and one for more distant. Obviously I had to set these for different sizes of snowflakes, different speeds of movement, etc. This was all based off of Trapcode’s Snowy Night presets, which I tweaked until I had less gentle snow and more roaring frostbite cold.

That nearly sold the effect, but not quite. So I added one more layer of stock footage. The footage was stock of smoke blowing across a black frame, which meant I could easily composite it in using the Screen transfer mode. Slowed down a bit and faded out in opacity, it looked good.

A brief but crucial aside, for a moment. Remember that when I brought in the submarine image, I had it at high resolution. 1500 pixels across. Why did I need all that for NTSC DV Standard Def, which is only 720×480? Well, because we had multiple shots planned. There’s the wide shot and then the closeups. I really didn’t want to make a new matte for each shot, so the best way to go about things is to have the extra resolution so you can go closer as needed. In fact, I always make my mattes with at least twice as much resolution as I practically need, just in case I end up needing to use the detail. It saves a lot more time than it takes. That way I was easily able to also do this effect with very little additional effort:

Notice here that I’ve added a character to the conning tower of the submarine, in the distance. That’s actually me, and in the wide shot there are 4 different instances of me walking around, sitting, and generally putting in an A-list extra performance!

Notice also that I’ve composited together another medium-close shot, to bring the characters into closer proximity. This is the final step: compositing in our foreground characters. This is basic keying 101, which you can learn in more detail pretty much anywhere. But the basics were this:

1. Make a garbage matte to get rid of stuff I know I’ll never want to see (parking garage might be a good example)
2. Key out the “bluescreen”. Here I used DV Garage’s dvMatte, which is the best and fastest keyer I’ve ever used for DV footage. It’s also extremely cheap, which is a plus.
3. Add some edge feathering and light wrap to make the characters blend better into the background. Hard edges are a dead giveaway. Admittedly, this isn’t Oscar-quality work, largely because of the limits of DV footage against an improvised background. But for an old DVX-100 and a come-as-you-are sky, it’s not bad!
4. Rescale and color correct the characters as needed to match the background.

And there you have it. Start to finish. Maybe I’ve left out a few things here and there. Maybe you still have questions. Maybe you think our show is insulting and we should be punched. Whatever the case, feel free to leave us some comments!

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