 Anatomy of an Effects Shot
The visual effects behind our latest promotional DVD
by Brent Milby
Here at Digital Juice, we produce a lot of promotional material. Our latest marketing strategy involves promotional DVDs, each of which focus on a particular product line. Of course, each of these videos prominently feature the best graphics we can find, but the artistry and creativity comes in how we incorporate and customize these in our finished video.
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| Figure 1 |
VIDEOTRAXX
Our most recent promo focuses on our VideoTraxx stock footage library. Since this huge library (over 10,000 film and video clips) covers so many subjects, we've organized the collection by subject, not entirely unlike a real-world library. To drive home the library metaphor, we chose to shoot our promo in the Marion County public library here in Ocala, Florida. Most of the video we shot was of our spokesperson Chuck addressing the camera, among the aisles and shelves of the library. The idea for the promo was to focus on the incredible volume of clips, the ease of use, the flexibility and the organization. To better illustrate the library metaphor one shot called for an effects shot of Chuck in a computer-generated (CG) virtual library, but instead of CG books on the shelves we replaced them with a virtual wall of VideoTraxx clips.
PURPOSEFUL EFFECTS
For the virtual library segment, it was important to represent thousands of clips on the screen at the same time to illustrate the massive volume of our libraries. Due to time constraints, it would have been impractical to use a 3D application (such as Autodesk 3ds Max). I ended up using After Effects® 3D engine to do the entire shot from top to bottom. We began by shooting Chuck against our chromakey wall (Figure 1) and then we used After Effects® Keylight color keyer to punch him out. The keyed images of Chuck were then mapped onto cards (Figure 2) and placed into the 3D space within After Effects®.
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| Figure 3 |
For the wide shots, we shot Chuck full body so that when he is placed into 3D space, the After Effects® 3D cameras can pan and revolve around him (Figure 3). We then have some limited freedom to move the camera in the scene and make adjustments to it without having to re-shoot anything. With our talent in place, we can now drop any element into the 3D space around the talent. Chuck stands in front of and between huge walls of fully animated clips representing library aisles. These aisles are simply large hi-res comps that I converted to 3D layers, rotated in the z-plane and positioned around Chuck in our virtual library. I added a glow filter to all of the clip layers for richer color and realism. There are no reflection attributes in the After Effects® 3D engine, but it was a pretty simple cheat to pull off the reflections in our glossy floor surface by duplicating a wall, flipping it upside down, repositioning it below the floor and ducking the transparency way down. This adds significantly to selling the illusion ( Figure 4).
AT THE CORE
All of this production work is done in-house, with our own hands, so that we can be sure that we're delivering the highest possible quality of product. There's a very small core team of about four of us (shooter, editor, audio and effects) producing these videos, so everything you see is definitely doable by a small studio. I'm not trying to minimize the amount of work that goes into these, but a little skill, some sweat and the right tools will take you a long way.
Brent Milby is Senior Animator at Digital Juice. |
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