jumping cameras and tropical settings

Got some neat stuff accomplished recently. I finally got all the camera movements taken care of and rendered out the entire first scene. I have a video clip of that available here:





Also, while building the second new scene (tropical), I stumbled upon the paint effects tools and found out two things that I did not know before: 1) it's rediculously easy to use and 2) you can apparently convert paint effect meshes into polygons. When I saw they had palm tree meshes as one of the paint effect brushes, I proceeded to paint and convert a nice little island of trees that looks really, really nice:



I will likely run into some small looping problems with the trees, as the tree meshes sway naturally with some kind of artificial wind. I have no idea how to control it, so I will either just deal with it as is and have it jump every 4 seconds, or I found out that if you duplicate the objects, they lose their animating properties and remain entirely still. Which route I take depends on how badly the jumping is between clips... Also, I wanted something thrown on the right side, so I made and textured a little flag sign thing that says 踊り, which is Japanese for "Dance." I don't have the little fire tiki things holding up the stage yet, but it's getting late, and I don't think I'll be able to work on it at all tomorrow, so I'll post what I have so far.

Looping woes and fixes

I ran into headache after headache trying to manage all the syncing for the spinning fan in my camera loops. I wanted to use segments I could jump between easilly but ran into continuity problems left and right when dolly shots came into play. There would need to be the center loop, a shot dollying to the right, and then a loop on the right. Getting all that to sync up to the music while also keeping the spinning fan in proper motion illusion drove me absolutely nuts. After consulting with Professor Moore yesterday, I came to grips with my over-calculating OCD and decided to drop the fan entirely. I also took up the advice again today when trying to think of an alternative. After about an hour of not getting the cloud particles to properly look or animate like steam, I cut it entirely and just used a metal grate over the opening (to save time and effort, its the same transparent chain link fence texture used on the floor).

With that in place, it was just a matter of rendering out the camera movements. I wanted to set up a particular framework so that the other two scenes could be done much more smoothly. Essentially, I am going to leave all the camera and aim animations the same, as well as the position of the floor and replace everything around those elements to re-save into a new file. That way there is perfect continuity between location changes. I got out some old fashion paper and wrote down where I had the cameras place in terms of timeline frames:

1-40: Drop down intro
67-79: Dolly shot from center to right
79-91: Dolly shot from right to center
91-103: Dolly shot from center to left
103-115: Dolly shot from left to center
116-235: Center loop (4 seconds)
236-356: Right loop (4 seconds)
357-477: Left loop (4 seconds)

About halfway through notating frames, I realized that the start and end frames were in identical locations to the loops. So I cut one frame off each end of each of the dolly shots (68-78, 80-90, 92-102, 104-114, respectively) so that they would fit nicely into the loops and there wouldn't be any potential stutter when switching between clips.

So with this in place, I can delete all external items (besides camera/aim and floor) and replace them with the other setting(s) and re-save them under the appropriate names and such.

WHEW... deep breaths...... OCD OCD OCD OCD.......

Footage shot, test composite made

Got the footage all shot yesterday after a good hour and a half of setup. As expected, it took quite a bit longer than I had planned, and I ran into more than a few hiccups here and there. First issue was the lighting. I have two light kits, but I was using the outside light from the garage door as a third source. As the day went on, the earth apparently turned and the light was encroaching on the screen. So throughout the afternoon, I had to lower and lower the door while upping the exposure to compensate. It worked out well in the end, and we got all the shots we needed though.




As for the content, I had originally planned on using a multi-camera setup to record the front, and either side about 30º off center. But I didn't have enough horizontal green screen space to do so. Luckily, I can just simulate the change in direction in Premiere. It will look similar to the flat characters in Parappa The Rapper; the first big mainstream music game available for PlayStation.

Anyway, I had been working on one of the 3D stages, and wanted to test the footage out, so I threw together a quick little keyed composite. Its still a bit crude and missing most of the graphics (as well as needing tweaking on camera angles and looping problems with the render clip), but I wanted to make sure the footage all worked so I wouldn't need to re-shoot anything. I uploaded that short clip to youtube:

Youtube doesn't seem to make good sense of the widescreen render, but it will work for the final medium on DVD.

For comparison, here is a video taken straight from the actual game that I am trying to pay homage to.

At my wit's end!

First of all, my work had scheduled me to close on Wednsday, thus nullifying my ability to shoot that night. But it doesn't seem to matter much anyway, because when I went in today to change my reservation from tomorrow to Friday (when I am scheduled to open, and will be free in the afternoon), I arrive to see this:

So what this means is not only did something happen to my reservation for room 140 (the blue screen room), someone else seems to have reserved all time slots for the following three days; including Friday. I am sick and tired of dealing with this facility and I will no longer be using it. After my final class today, I am stopping by a fabric store to pick up some chroma green screen fabric and will shoot it in my garage. I have a lighting kit and I am using my friend's professional camera anyway, so I don't think it will be that bad.

I have been putting off building the 3D models for the scenes, as I was assuming to have my shooting done and would be working on that instead. I did spend a small amount of time preparing the 2D graphics and animating them to the music. I have a simple beat blink that is synced pretty well with the music, but nothing noteworthy enough to render out and upload to youtube.

As far as the 3D models are concerned, I have some rough preliminary sketches of the three different scenes, and I designed them as such so it would be simple for me to build in 3D. I will begin modeling the scenes probably tonight after watching election results. I should be able to get at least one of the scenes done by tomorrow morning before work.

Blue Screen Room Booked

I finally got a date nailed down for shooting. First of all, the green screen setup at the middle school was only temporary, so that's out. But as for the room on campus, after finding out that Thursdays were no bueno, I reserved the overnight block on a Wednsday (Nov. 5th). We'll be getting in there around 6pm and will have pretty much the whole night to film. With the shot list I posted last time, and the availability of multiple cameras, I can't imagine shooting would take more than an hour or two. But should some issues arise, at least we'll have plenty of time to work them out. I already plan to bring my own lights, extension cord, and power strip just in case. I also plan to direct-feed record onto my laptop for at least one of the cameras, just so I can make sure the footage is workable. I wouldn't want to get home with a bunch of footage that turned out to be unusable for one reason or another (too many shadows in bluescreen, angle cut off, cropped wrong, etc).

Now, if for some crazy reason the blue screen room doesn't work out, I do have a backup plan of using my own personal lighting kit on some chroma green fabric that I have. It's not as much, so it would be harder to work with, but at least I'm not up a creek without a paddle should the blue screen room somehow fall through.

new possible shooting arrangements

Apparently, my mother's good friend who works at a middle school mentioned that said middle school has a green screen. I should know by tomorrow whether or not I can actually use it. If I can, it would be very beneficial, as it opens up my window of availability for shooting. There are a lot of limitations trying to shoot in the media center on campus: can only reserve 1 week in advance, have to compete with classes/other reservations, and cannot shoot on weekends. I haven't checked the place out myself, as I had only just been told about it today. But hopefully it will work out; it would save me more than a few headaches.

Planned shot list for green screen shooting

I finished typing out the shot descriptions and planning for the shooting next week. I tried for a good half hour to figure out how to post it here (it's a nice table), but I couldn't find a way to convert it automatically without adding superfluous excess data that blogspot doesn't understand, and I didn't want to manually type out the html. Anyway, I will just post a link to it here. You can see in that file the breakdown of the 2 minute song and how I plan to shoot. Characters are based on my friend's expertise in the particular dance styles. I don't have character names yet. And I still need to write the intro scene. Hopefully I can get that done by the end of today.

frustrations

Things were incredibly difficult to work on this week. With complications at work, other assignments due in other classes, and getting sick from Friday till Monday, I haven't been able to do as much on this project as I had hoped. Also, due to scheduling complications, my performer will be unavailable until Thursday of next week (November 6th). And even then, I can only work in the night time, after 6pm. It's really frustrating not being able to get over this hurdle, but that is the risk I have to take when working with people other than myself... I can't really begin work on the 3D modeling or placement/animation of the 2D graphics until I have this footage. So I will have to concentrate my efforts on designs, storyboards, and planning. I am setting a chunk of time tomorrow specifically for writing up the opening scene, which I should be able to shoot this coming weekend, as I have both days free from work.

I managed to get a simple workaround for the mismatch in rendering resolutions using widescreen. It's a trick I picked up from a project I did on my own some time ago using just a black and white rectangle the size of the screen. Anyway, long story short, if I render scenes out of Maya in 854x480, for some reason, it will perfectly fit with the standard NTSC widescreen DVD settings and not need stretching once inside premiere.

I'm also working on a timechart to organize what shots I want for different segments of the song. This will help both in the shooting phase and the editing phase for organizing and keeping track of shots. I'll get that posted up as soon as I complete it.

Green Screen/3D environment Composite Test Video

This is a test video I compiled using a basic 3D room I built in Maya and some test footage I shot of a small figure in front of a green screen. I seemed to have worked out the kinks of getting those two forms of media together, so it's on to the next set of things now while I wait for my dancer to get ready to be filmed.

testing phase update (2)

It seems it's a lot easier than I thought to do the image combination into a video clip via Premiere; it can be done completely automatically by checking a "Numeric Series" box when importing the images. Now it's just a matter of getting the pixel aspect ratios to match up between the render and the scene in Premiere. Cool, one hurdle now passed!

testing phase update

I attempted to run through some setup tests yesterday and hit a few snags in production. My plan was to film some small action figure or something in front of a green screen and make a quick-and-dirty 3D rendered background to throw it in. I needed to see how simply this could be done. The greenscreen keying is actually a lot easier than i remembered, but I ran into a major problem in Maya (the 3D modeling program I am using). For some reason, it will not render a scene as a movie clip; only as single, still images. I remember I used to be able to render .avi clips from it all the time (and even did so for a project last december...). But for some reason, the file would never complete properly. After some google-ing, I found out that apparently Maya is terrible at rendering .avi files, and the best course of action was to render the single frames and combine them in some other program like Premiere or After Effects. But even this is proving problematic, as I haven't yet found a time-effective way of putting the images into Premiere...

I want to have something to show for my progress by next Tuesday, and my work schedule is proving difficult with 40 hours this week. So worst case scenario, I will just continue with my testing using a still image until I can find a solution to my movie rendering problem.

Song picked

Picked a song for the project earlier today off of the copyright-issue-free website freeplaymusic.com. It's called Funky Summer, and lists the composers as Pete Calandra, Scott P. Schreer and Published by: Freeplaymusic. This should take care of any possible future problems I would have had if I used my originally-planned copyrighted music.

Project Description

After scrapping my initial project, which was deemed out of my league in terms of time and resources, I have fallen into my backup project plan.

Project Description

For more than ten years, I have avidly followed the genre of videogames known as music and rhythm games. Today, games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are staples in American pop culture, but there are many important and pivotal games that preceded these. The one that I will be focusing on for this project is a personal choice as the one which really stood out to me; the first title to really grab me into the genre. It was released in America under the name of Bust A Groove (known in Japan as Bust A Move).

The premise of the game is to pick a character, and through rhythmic button presses and timing, get that character to dance against opponents to a variety of songs. There were “attacks” and “dodges” thrown in, but they were not substantial parts. At the end of the song, whichever player performed best was considered to have won that round and move on.

My project seeks to re-create this gaming experience using a live actor and digital environments. After a brief intro sequence, the video will transition straight into the “game” mode, where all on-screen graphics of the game should be pretty successfully represented.

This project aims to pay homage to the early console music and rhythm game genre as well as test my personal technical skills in 3D graphics rendering, video compositing, green screen keying, and 2D animation in Premiere. I have the tools at hand, and more-or-less, the know-how, but I’ve never done such a comprehensive project before. I am excited for it and hope I can complete it to my personal satisfaction.

There will be a full timeline posted soon. So far, I have a tentative timeline optimistically running up through Week 7:

Projected Timeline

Week 1
- Passed

Week 2
- Scrap over-ambitious project and begin planning on backup project
- Work on song selection
- Find out procedures for booking green screen rooms on campus
- Discuss song choice with dancer, send song to dancer, dancer begins choreography

Week 3
- Begin video graphics tests pre-shooting (test all premiere effects and make templates for later use)
- Book green screen room for week 4 (perhaps 5, depending on dancer’s availability and choreography completion)
- Write and Storyboard opening scene
- Contact friends to play roles for opening scene

Week 4
- Shoot opening scene
- Begin editing opening scene
- Possibly start shooting green screen dancer
- Continue video graphics tests/template making

Week 5
- Complete editing opening scene
- Complete shooting of green screen dancer
- Continue graphics templates and begin syncing them to music
- Begin 3D modeling for stage

Week 6
- Edit footage of dancer into project
- Continue 2D graphics
- Continue 3D modeling
- Run 3D test renders into Premiere

Week 7
- Complete 3D modeling and begin full rendering
- Begin compiling renders into premiere
- Continue 2D graphics syncing

First Post

Just testing to see how this works out.