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.
Godspeed and God Bless,
Abraham Lincoln
Yo dudes. This is the original pilot. If you haven't seen it, you can watch it now.
As of this very moment, the dawn of October 2005, our plans are to spend several actual hours rewriting the last half of the episode to make it, y'know, good.
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:
Yeah! Awesome! That's totally going to look real when we're done with it! Sigh. I thought we were doomed. But then, with surprisingly little effort, I turned it into this:
So how did we do that?
My first rule-of-thumb for visual effects is that it's the little details that sell. Even if your bigger picture doesn't quite hold up, you can sell an effect with nice little touches. So I knew we would be incorporating some little things into this shot to make it real.
But first things first. 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. When I was a teenager I used to know pretty much everything there was to know about the Cold War, so I was able to very quickly grab the following image using a Google image search.
I knew it had the qualities I needed, most important being resolution. The image is displaying on this page at a little less than half size, but the file is the original 1500x358, if you download it. This image also has the bonus quality of being probably copyrighted, but since our show wasn't for sale I wasn't too concerned about that.
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:
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:
And now we a digital matte painting that actually looks pretty good. Total time to make it so far: less than an hour.
But now we need to add some of those details. 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. Absolutely 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 720x480? 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:
Now it was just a matter of bringing in our foreground characters. This is basic keying 101, which you can learn in more detail pretty much anywhere. But the basics were this:
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 send me an email!.