Warping onto the Ship

This is the first shot on the ship. The background was created with a couple of different layers incase I wanted to shift them about. This was useful in another shot (I'll blog about later) but to a lesser extent was useful here when importing the 'wheel' footage into After Effects. The Wheel was a flat 2d image I'd photoshopped, I then turned it into a 3D shape using after effects and was able to angle it on the side wall and then layer some 'lumps' of the ship over it. This is very practical as I am using the same wheel in another shot but at a different angle so it will help a lot with continuity. Using the 3D aspects of After Effects proved incredibly useful when creating the other Close Up shots and POV shots as I could use the same photoshop layers but give the impression they were being seen at another angle.

The glowing of the Warp points was a slight afterthought so I've attempted to add a little bit of glow to Jeffs boots as well as tint her slightly orange. Ideally I would have tried to light her on the day, therefore getting a much more natural and effective glow, however I think this gets the message across. To do this I duplicated the green screen footage but only masked the boots and adjusted the colour, opacity etc. To be honest I don't think this works very well the glowing looks too foggy and I should probably have looked into some better ways and effects to create a nicer more believable look.

The warping in the above video is a little bland and relies too heavily on lens flare (something I'm quite keen not to use too much, if any of, unless it's needed) It doesn't seem powerful enough to justify someone being warped from the ground onto a ship so I have attempted to add a little more drama to it with Light rays. I think this works better and compliments the 'burn' look which I have added (CC film burn) (I'll probably talk more about this effect when blogging about the 'Warping Out/Abduction' scene.)

I've only just noticed the giant white square in the middle of these renders! This is obviously something I'll have to remove and goes to show that constantly working on something without looking with fresh eyes can make you miss even the most obvious of mistakes!



Matt showed me how to merge the green screen footage more smoothly with the environment by 'Trackmatting' which involves duplicating the footage and turning the first into an 'Alpha' and blurring the duplicate. This subtly helps the green screened footage sit better in the composition and is a little extra tweak that I've applied to the above, and will apply to other shots if needed.