Friday, May 12, 2017

Sculpture Fest

We're on for Sculpture Fest! I'll be projecting your work from 9pm-10pm tonight. Come by and say hi!

More info on the event (which involves live music as well as sculpture) is here:

http://renosculpturefest.com

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Planetarium directions

Here's a map from Inline to the Planetarium:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Incline+Village,+Nevada/Fleischmann+Planetarium,+1664+N+Virginia+St,+Reno,+NV+89557/@39.3864288,-119.9572027,11z/data=!4m8!4m7!1m2!1m1!1s0x80996ff06d251165:0x6d65149fbd9c544b!1m2!1m1!1s0x80994716f8adcd1d:0x1d8b8cd413f7d327!3e0

Fleischmann Planetarium and Science Center is located north of Lawlor Events Center on Virginia and 16th streets, on the University of Nevada, Reno campus, 1.5 miles north of the downtown Reno arch. Free permit parking is available in the West Stadium Parking Complex, level 3, just east of the planetarium.Park between designated planetarium parking signs.

Feel free to call me at: 415-845-5670

Really looking forward to this one.

Monday, April 17, 2017

After Effects Final

Hey everyone. Our final for this class will start at 11:30am May 5th - a Friday. This isn't the official time, since we're pairing up with the other DART class, so please check the linked finals schedule below to make sure you don't have any other finals slotted for that time. We are going to leave SNC at 11:30 and drive down to the Flieschman Planetarium at UNR – and our screening goes from 1pm-2pm. It will take about an hour to get back to SNC, so the ultimate time frame you want to have clear is 11:30-3pm.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xulgjiux1f2vwdv/Spring-2017-Final-Exam-Schedule-011717-FINAL.pdf.pdf?dl=0

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Planetarium cutout

Here's a link to the "hole" for the planetarium dome - place it in the top layer of your AfterEffects or Premiere document. The dimensions for this piece are 1440px X 1440 px.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/63cuqyw3neyw6ri/planetarium-hole-1440.png?dl=0

Sunday, April 2, 2017

For Monday (4/3)

Just a reminder we're doing an experimental shooting day Monday, using the dome camera. So please bring toys, dollhouses, objects, textures, what have you - that we can place around the camera, or drape over a glass bowl that we can use as a dome over the camera itself. We're just going to try and shoot as many "environments" for eh green screen as we can.

Monday, March 20, 2017

Face warp "cheat sheet"



The most confusing part of this tutorial is the section on "reverse stabilization" in the first part. Here's a cheat sheet to help out with that and other details:

MORE DETAILS FROM THE TUTORIALS

When filming, make sure the actor's face stays square in frame (this will make the tracking easier).

When tracking the footage, in the Tracker window, click "stabilize motion" in Tracker window. Make sure your track type is selected as: stabilize (this is a different setting than from the previous tracking exercise – that track type was set to "transform"). Select both Position and Rotation.

The corners of the eyes are usually good tracking points. Under "analyze," click the "play" button to analyze forward. If the track isn't doing a great job, you can go to middle of footage, reset track points, then analyze forward and analyze backward. Also, you can manually adjust points frame-by-frame (click on the frame and re-position the big square targets). Hit "Apply," then you will get your footage floating with black corners (as the edges of the tracked footage rotate through space).

To fix the black edges, you'll pre-compose the footage. To keep track of which is which, use this naming convention – call your first comp "Original Footage," and the new comp "Pre-Comp Footage."

Layer > Pre-compose > Move all attributes into new composition. This is the one you'll call "Pre-Comp Footage." A "pre-comp" is essentially a nested layer of series of layers in another composition.

This is where it starts to get confusing in the tutorial. But here's a summary.


View both comps ( "Original Footage," and "Pre-Comp Footage") stacked instead of tabbed (pull one of the tabs down until they both pop out).
Increase size of "Pre-Comp Footage" (in Composition > Composition Settings).
In your  "Original Footage,"  comp, make anchor point, position and rotation visible.
Alt-click on the stopwatch for each of those layers to see the expressions. 

Pick-whip FROM "Original Footage," TO "Pre-Comp Footage." Link the following properties.
FROM Position TO anchor point.
FROM Anchor point TO position.
Rotation goes to rotation, and AFTER you do that, add the "*-1" to the expression on "Original Footage." 

Once you've done this, you should have your footage reverse stabilized. Your subsequent adjustments for the demon face (or sunglasses, or what have you) should be don on the "Original Footage" comp. In the "Original Footage" comp, for example, you can bring in sunglasses on a new layer, and parent that layer to the "Pre-Comp Footage" layer. It will then inherit the motion values from the "Pre-Comp Footage" layer.

THE LIQUIFY FILTER

Effect > Distort > Liquify

You can keyframe the distortion percentage overall.

CHANGING COLORS 

You can do this via an adjustment layer, which has a mask attached to constrain the effect to a specific part of the footage.

Layer > New > Adjustment Layer

You can apply a number of effects to the masked area – glow, color correction, etc.