VFX Post Production: Creating the Effects

Once I had finished putting all of my video together and I had added the initial sound and dialog in, I moved onto actually adding in my VFX effect which included smoke, background particles and ground shakes. This became quite an easy process as I had already done the testing for it, which made it very easy to add the effects in, especially the camera shakes and the floating particles.

I firstly wanted to create the ground shakes as these were going to be the easiest part to complete and I already had the audio in place, so I just had to sync it up so t rumbled at the same time.  Like the sound, starting off quietly, I wanted the shakes to be very soft and first and then grow; but not too much that you can't tell whats happening. To do this I watched a tutorial on how to create a camera shake from YouTube. It was actually a video about how to fly like the man of steel but had a good part in the middle that explained how to create the camera shake, which I found very helpful. These shakes didn't take that long to create so I got this part done fairly quickly to a high standard. Once I was happy with how this section of the video was looking I went back to the middle to add the background particles onto the forest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1V3Ssi4XOo

This was a very easy task but each time I added a new shake I did have to pre-compose it in between adding the new one as then I could change the frequency of the next one without all the previous ones changing as well. At this stage I also had to add a black slug behind each layer due to the back plate moving too far out of shot and the mirror edges not working properly. This didn't cause too much of a problem as the black blends into the rest of the background edge. 

I wanted to add small particles into the background as it looked very flat and lifeless. So therefore by adding these in I hoped to bring a bit more realism to the scene. As the test for it went really well this process did not take very long as I already knew what settings I would want on the video.

I used the same process that I looked at in my test video for this but at the end of this one I also added a glow effect onto the particles to make them seem that little bit more realistic. I am quite happy with how they look and what they bring to the environment; they make it feel that there is life in the jungle. My only criticism of how it looks is when there is an object in front of it what makes them look a little fake, but this is only a minor set back. 

Very quickly before adding in the smoke I also added a small effect of time shifting onto the film for when the time machine appears. This was done very simply by adding in a bulge from the effects toolbar. It was very quick to get this right and the effect looks really good. I wanted to go with this idea so that the time machine didn't just appear and actually shifted into the world instead of just popping.

The last effect that I decided to add in was rolling smoke along the floor that comes out from the time machine. This was definitely the most difficult part to the add due to how I wanted the smoke to roll across the floor. I had looked at a number of different things on the internet for how I could add in this effect but none of them were particularly helpful and didn't offer the result that I wanted. I had originally, in my testing, looked at how I could make the smoke on After Effects but this did not produce the realistic 3D look that I wanted. I also thought about doing it in Maya, but found out that this was a step that I needed to have done earlier for it to have worked. I also had another option which was to create the smoke in Unity, this didn't seem like an extremely difficult task as I had previously looked at ground fog before and had applied it to my own game level last year. I was pretty confident that this was going to give me the closest look to the effect that I wanted to achieve the most; even if it didn't look perfect but getting the camera angle to line up correctly wouldn't have been easy.

So, really my only option left was to use images of smoke and get the to gradually move across the floor while growing and shrinking and then also rotating at the same time to give it a bit of life. I think this is probably the best idea out of all of them with such a small amount of time left to complete the project even if it did not produce the exact look that I wanted in the end.

When I actually got going it was not too difficult as all I had to do was duplicate the smoke cloud I had and add the variation onto it so that they were produced at different time and  rolled across the ground for different lengths. I also made sure that if there were any trees that would sit in front of the smoke I masked, so that they would be on top of the smoke.

I then came across another problem, which was that my man suddenly appears out of nowhere. This was due to a scene being cut out from the original designs as it didn't flow properly with the scene. This was a pretty annoying issue as there wasn't any good way of solving it, so I tried to make a few more areas of smoke so that it was a lot thicker and you couldn't see the man getting out until he was there. This then sticks with my original plan of having him walk through tick smoke and then start to laugh. 

In the end, I am relatively happy with it. I know that it could be a lot better but as previously stated with time restrictions it will have to do in the end. I do think the film looks better with it, but again I wish I had had more time to play around with the smoke effects as this would have vastly improved my film in the end.