Final Production Entry

For the creation of my DVD menu for the fake video game/movie feature “Veiled Isle” I mainly used Nuke for the brunt of my compositing and only basic assembly was completed in After Effects. Most of my work was based on live footage, so I made great use of Primatte to key my green screen footage of rocks for my druid rock ring, footage of my lady of the lake, and mist footage. I made numerous color corrections in Nuke using Hue Shift and Hue Correct. While working with my green screen footage as well as other layered footage, I also used the Bezier tool, specifically to mask out artifacts or other garbage by passing it into Primatte as the alpha. The Bezier tool also came in handy while hand keying the moving shadows on my druid rock ring. To further enhance the waterfall on the main menu screen I added a soft glow using Tinderbox, and used the droplet effect to help make my lady of the lake pop and seem present in the waterfall yet otherworldly. I tried to add these small touches whenever possible. Other basic tools within Nuke that I made use of were transforms, changes to bounding boxes, merges based on geometry as well as many other merges.

In the end I also had to create some of my fog within Maya and bring those renders into Nuke, but I treated them like green screen footage and still used Primatte while working with it. The actual fog/mist I filmed wasn’t on a dark enough background to be used by itself and still look smooth enough to convey the feel I wanted.

I found that bounding boxes for my project were rather glitchy from time to time, and that even though I may have set my project to be 1920x1080 HD footage, and made sure to specify each time I read in my footage that I wanted it to be 1920x1080 I noticed that Nuke cropped it to be smaller despite my best efforts. I found a few work arounds for this that required adding constants into my merges, and in the end I was able to get everything to render out full size.

3/11 Update

This week I redid the removal of the green screen behind my stones for my ruins. I really didn't like how the IBK process initially turned out, and had greater success using primatte. I also separated my lady of the lake footage from the green screen using primatte. The image behind her is just a placeholder until I get the real footage. I spent some time trying to make realistic shadows follow my ruins as the time of day changes and I think I carried this out well enough so I don't have to record my stones again or use 3D models with simulated light.






I finished some additional concept art done by hand (scans will be uploaded soon) and just need to place this on my lit parchment.

I wasn't able to film my waterfall this past week, but I have the Sony HD camcorder reserved for Wednesday 3/10 and I took the rest of this week off from work to get my footage and continue putting everything together (I work full time along with school full time so it gets crazy around finals week!). I may also shoot my fog footage again because I've had some issues getting the fog off of my irregularly black background. I have a very large uniformly black piece of wood at my apartment that will work much better, and I'll be sure to get closer to the actual fog this time.

Week of 3/4

This week was fairly productive in terms of rounding up assets and making a nice dent in my gantt chart. Here is an updated copy of my gantt chart that shows I'm right on/ahead of schedule.





I do need to make more conceptual artwork, but I'm ahead of schedule since I already filmed the lady of the lake. This week I worked on my parchment, conceptual art, thumbnail images for the scene selection screen, and further processing of my raw footage. I'm still looking for an easier way to handle this huge footage (both file storage size and resolution while working) because it's very laggy and hard to manage.

Week of 2/25

This week I worked on getting a lot of my raw footage for my final project. In class I filmed the rocks that I'll be using for my ruined druid ring. I also went in the green screen room with a group at night and I filmed my lady of the lake talent as well as the mist.

I bought a fairly inexpensive fog machine to make the mist, that way if I need to film it again I won't have to worry about tracking dry ice down again. So far I like how the footage looks and am in the process of bringing everything into Nuke.

I did have some problems getting my raw footage from the camera to the computer. I was unable to play the raw footage - I had to open it in After Effects and render it in order to make it viewable. This was very time consuming because I didn't want to compress the videos since this is my raw footage, but rendering it took forever. I'm still trying to find a way to reduce the file size of the new videos. Below are images of my raw footage and my first stab at using the IBK tool on the druid circle rocks.

Week of 2/18

Over the past week/2 weeks I had a chance to outline all of my assets and how long I believe it will take me to make them. Due to the cancellation of class last week and the snow, plus being sick on top of that, I decided to work more on assets that don't require filming (such as the waterfall, woman's face, and green screen stones).

I mainly worked on finding high quality backgrounds for my scenes that require them, font selection, and crescent imagery. Currently I have two island images I'm deciding on, and two grassy plain images. One of the island images shows a castle, but if I use that one I will be editing that out. I decided to use a Copperplate Gothic Light font for a good amount of my work. I went through a ton of fonts and it fit the theme/look & feel of my fake video game. I also worked on the crescent imagery. I had to push back the date of the druid circle green screening due to the class cancellation, but I'm ready for that this next week.