But then we made a science show!

Well, more like a parody of one.

We had a lot of fun with this, coming up with ideas to put into a fake intro to make it seem somewhat plausible that there had actually been episodes before. Big thanks to SFU for letting us (or rather, not telling us to leave) film around campus and inside a lecture hall on a weekend. Don’t worry, we made sure to turn the lights off before we left. Saving the environment!

Then all it needed was a cheesy song, and an intro put together in After Effects that took far longer than I expected it to. But it’s practice. Actually I think we’ve had a fair bit of practice with the cheesy songs so far.

Anyways, hopefully we can get on a more frequent schedule over the next while. We have a couple of months until our one year anniversary of making just for fun, so let’s see what we can accomplish.

Peace

Anyways it turns out that you can get a lot of stuff for free on your birthday. So here’s the entire day crammed into 9 minutes where we find out how much we can really get.

If you stuck through the entire thing, then congrats – you’re amazing and I love you. This video holds the record for the longest production we’ve made so far, and also for the total amount of effort that went into planning and organization. Not only did it start probably half a year prior with signing up for various customer clubs and such, but the few weeks leading up to the day were hectic as well.

Most of the locations that we visited just to shoot some fun scenes in (Laser Dome, 6pack, E-Exit) were contacted well before hand. Surprisingly, most places were incredibly receptive to the idea of being in the video. I love all of those places too.

So we started at roughly 2AM for some breakfast (shooting the intro scene), and then ran on about 3 hours of sleep for the entire day – They really need to schedule gold medal hockey games at better times. But regardless, the day was a hell of an adventure and we managed to go through our entire list. Then I edited a bunch.

Then this happened:

Our first media mention! I had contacted Vancity Buzz after posting the video, and they responded quite enthusiastically. This was incredibly exciting, and it appeared to fare pretty well. Thanks to them we were able to share our video with a lot of locals, and hopefully help them out with some birthday planning. Thanks Vancity Buzz!

But that wasn’t the end of it.

A little while later, I share the video again with Reddit, specifically the Vancouver subreddit. It did fairly well there too. In fact, this helped it catch the attention of another party:

So of course we contact them. They wanted us to wake up super early the following Monday morning so that we could do this:

It was awesome – a radio interview is totally worth getting up for! Thanks CBC!

So anyways, we had a hell of a lot of fun making this video, and it resulted in a lot of great attention. We can only hope that some of our future work is equally well received. Big thanks to everyone.

Naturally, after we had settled on an idea and decided to start filming, the rain stopped.

Here’s the video:

So we had to fake it a bit. Using creative placement of sprinklers/hoses, and a bit of vfx magic, we were able to make it seem rainy. I guess… Also it was sunny at the same time. Try not to focus on that. In fact, try not to focus on a lot of the inconsistencies.

Let’s talk about a couple of the shots.

The intro shot took a fair bit of work – going through the glass door. We built a DIY steadicam – the Silver Flyer – and gave it a try. Unfortunately it wasn’t balanced too well because we were missing a few critical pieces. While it absorbed the shock of footsteps, it was still swinging around a fair bit. After Effects was able to help though. The warp stabilization tool is pretty amazing if used sparingly, and we were able to get a decently smooth shot with limited distortion of the background (these two trade off with eachother – ever see those videos on YouTube where they steady a cell phone video, but it’s all warbly and warping in the background? Same idea).

However, the next tough part was recreating the glass. There’s a great tutorial on the Video Copilot website for this effect. Unfortunately, their technique seems to work best if you have a perfectly straight and steady shot to begin with. We didn’t have that luxury. I was able to resort to having a mask simply track the edges of the door, while scaling the size of the flat backyard image as we got closer. It worked out alright, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. I threw the title on top of it to take the attention away =)

Next, the lightning and body explosion. Again, thanks to Video Copilot for the great tutorials. This time I was able to follow it pretty closely to recreate the effect. The lightning was pretty straight forward and I played around with it popping through different parts of the body. Might have spent too much time making some fun individual frames considering how fast they flash by (there may even be a couple of juvenile secrets hidden if you take a close look).

The body explosion wasn’t too bad either. I ran into some trouble making the background without me look normal after the explosion. I forgot that the camera changes focus when it zooms in on the foreground. Luckily we can distract the viewer from that with a nice big blood splat on the lens (Yes I know if it actually hit the lens then it would be much larger, in this case it appears to be hitting a pane of glass in front of the camera – but I felt it had greater comedic effect that way. Also that splat sound, oh man). I was also pretty happy with the focus shifting on all objects in the shot together. It helped it look consistent and somewhat believable.

Finally we had a number of shots that we slowed down considerably – the dramatic reveals of “Thor”. We don’t have a slow motion camera, but After Effects has some great tools to do this for us – namely time remapping using the powerful pixel motion setting. Other than that, there was a lot of playing with colours, levels, and curves. It turned out okay.

There was a lot learned from working on this video. The punch-line may not be incredibly effective, but it was a lot of fun putting it all together. I hope you all enjoy it.

We thought we would give back to the internet community that taught us so much, by teaching you how to perform this most exciting blast of energy.

But in all reality, after watching some videos of people using After Effects for creating the kamehameha, I gave it a try myself. After originally doing a mock up of the close hand shot (with the stationary ball and light spilling past the fingers), I was incredibly happy with the result and had to complete a video surrounding it.

All in all it required a lot of masking, using additional plugins for lighting effects. Unfortunately the end was a little rushed, but a cheesy death scene in this case was good enough.

Hope you liked it.

Peace

We had a fair bit of fun shooting this – managing to get the filming done in a day. Luckily things didn’t go in the same sequence as the video would lead you to believe. It was the third house that actually gave us the best response and helped encourage us for the rest of the day.

However, we had to figure a lot of things out – including the use of the microphones, and the clever hiding of our camera guy. Despite his best efforts he was spotted on a number of occasions. We’ll have to work on that.

All in all I think it turned out well. Hopefully people that watch it get a kick out of it too.

Peace

This was an idea intended to give us a learning experience – something simple with some basic effects. Managed to film the original shoot in under a couple of hours. The majority of the time came after the fact, figuring things out and learning new programs and such.

Learned:
Introduction to various techniques: Motion tracking, masking, rotoscoping. First time using After Effects, but it turns out the tutorials on YouTube are pretty easy to follow. I ended up playing around with it mostly for the less important text parts.
Cheesy music is harder to make than it seems, maybe I’ll try to find some license free music in the future.

Lessons:
Get an external mic – it’s a nightmare to try and fix audio after the fact, when you realize that wind has completely ruined your live recording.
Film better – a number of our shots are out of focus. Although it’s a little hard to tell when filming.
Film extra, extend the shots a bit to have more room to play with when editing, especially when cutting voice to sound natural in a conversation.

This video wasn’t intended to be perfect, but it’s a good starting point for what we come out with next.

Peace

Then recently we had the opportunity to work on an application for Amazing Race Canada.

Turned out we had a lot of fun doing it.

Also we learned about white balancing after the fact. Give us a break.

Just working on figuring out this whole WordPress deal.

See you soon~