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Unit 10

James Bond Intro

Memories of Words

Set in europe a new Pope was elected who slowly changed the face of Religion and all European people. The Pope forced religion and his beliefs on all citizens, those who opposed will be humiliated on extreme measures and those that may stand a threat against the Pope would mysteriously disappear; nobody would question their disappearance. the majority of citizens have no freedom of speech and live in terror of being the Popes target or a victim of the enforced religion. The large portion of people believe and wish for a revolution: to kill the Pope. Many attempted assassination attempts were carried out but most dissapeared and some were used as a deterrence in public executions. People pray for a saviour but are too scared to carry out a riot or even a civil war as the opposition is just too strong.

The song has no words but instead it has humming as if the singer is being silenced and had their freedom of speech taken away. This is perfect for my intro sequence as people are forced intoa belief and cannot rebel or else they would be punished. The song manages to convey her need to express herself while being limited to not use any words. 
The song matched the overarching theme of the James Bond intros: opera singing, but this song has its own twist which fits to the modern james bonds series.

Bad apple is a japanese animated music video which is composed entirely of shadown and silhouettes. This style was achieved by animating 3D models  then filtering to black and white and using a postprocessing program to create these seamless transitions. James Bond intros have a similar style in that it uses silhouttes to hide the chracters identities and mostly uses one camera that transitions in various ways (mostly by zooming in) to the next scene.
Bad apple achied this by using 3d animations, but I will be using a greenscreen and life actors  which will create more fluent and real movements. The only problem will be making transitions as it will be a lot harder with real people than it is with 3d characters.

To make the intro more rich I will add colour: red as blood and anger, and gold for wealth and religion. This will help the viewer understand which character is which, since normal people's silhouttes are harder to destinguish than 3d characters.
The splash of colour on black and white images all use the colour to emphasize the beauty or a deeper meaning of the object. It also serves as a great eye catcher as the human eye is naturally attracted to colour.

Using Green Screen

I downloaded the foreground from youtube's free green screen backgrounds, then added my masked out green screen image on an upper layer then masked out some of the foreground and put it above my green screen. This creates a since of depth in the scene. The green screen image was too bland so I colour graded it by adding more red which helps it match the scene.

 

 

-- low animation ---

0-3 fade in to an industrial city span - overview shot

4-8 pan to alleyway, cross, peasant being beaten

9-14 camera through barrel aimed at pope in car, shot on drop

14-17 (cut) gun flare slowly dies off

17-21 zoomed in shot of the cracked window and popes face, blood effect, assassin is dead

22-28 side view(pan l to r), from peasants with crossed mouth looking at pope on balcony, wall behind pope to devil playing

29-34 james bond picking up phone

34-38 JB kissing females leg (contractor)

38-42 JB opening case with golden gun

42-46 Pan on zoomed gun reveal 007

47-51 JB leaving with gun (in bg), woman in foreground (pan left to JB silhouette)

51-55 JB approaching cathedral with gun, fence wall and camera block view

-- full animation --

55-1.00 Panning shot JB against wall looking at guards, pans left on other side of wall on approaching guard

1.00-1.05  (split shot) both JB and pope praying towards Jesus (cross)

1.05-1.07  Both grab golden weapons
1.07-1.10  JB pours poison into chalice

1.10 - 1.15 Camera focuses on the poison within the chalice and zooms out to servant giving the chalice to Pope

1.15 - 1.18 Pope Drinks from the chalice
1.18 - 1.20 (cut) zoom in to red liquid spilling from Popes mouth  

1.20 - 1.21 Pope coughs out blood filling a large portion of the screen
1.21 - 1.23 Blood pours down from top of the screen making the whole screen red

 

7+ seconds allowed for buffer time

 

Kaleidoscopic effects all around with scenes from the previous animations all being presented in a semi-psychadelic way

 

1.30-min end

1.40-max end

Planning

Actors:

Pope - has cape and a sceptre (crown added in vfx)

James Bond - Tuxedo Red tie (golden gun)
Guards tuxedo no tie (or black)

Female contractor (entirely vfx)

Props:  (all can be cardboard cutouts )

some sort of tube for sceptre
Chalice

test tube/bottle

pistol

 

Green screen shots:

Pope- sitting facing left, coughing blood, praying, giving speech

JB - Picking up phone, Kissing feet(vfx), opening case, sneaking against wall, praying, leaving, pouring poison, looking at something

Servant giving chalice to Pope

A change of Plans

After I pitched the idea to several friends I was met with disapproval and the advice of not making a story line but a bunch of abstract scenes. Most James bond intro scenes don't have a story and focus on abstract objects and symbolism. As I started making the first scene I realized how I will be limiting myself if I decide to follow the story as it will be just silhouettes interacting with each other. So I decided that I'm going to  have to scrap the story, still to the black and white theme but this time have a lot more abstract movements and effects. This will give me the freedom to produce really odd scenes with a lot of symbolism and allowing me to use a much wider range of techniques in after effects.

Using After Effects


Making the text explode was very easy and fast, I only had to configure the position of the explosion, its force and gravity. I tried to make it so some pieces fly right next to the camera, because making a flat 2D explosion is boring and very old fashioned. I added a glow to al particles to make the scene look overall more impressive.

I downloaded the eye from Mitch Martinez and the particle effect. The particle effect layer wasn't transparent and therefore I had to change the mode of the layers; I made the particle layer a "lighten". This caused the layer to be transparent but the particles themselves were too transparent on the eye, to fix that I duplicated the particles until I got the ideal transparency then pre-composed them together. When the eye's iris gets smaller I make it more impactful by adding a radial blur to the particles. This effect allows me to have a focal point where the particles aren't blurred and al around it the particles will be blurred and stretched outside from the focal point. It not only makes the video more impactful but also directs the users eye to the focal point.

To add some story to the clip I added a gunshot and heavy breathing to imply that the person just got shot without showing a bullet, blood, or a gun.

Section 1

The first iteration of this scene had the man praying on a blank background for 12 seconds which was really boring and blank, so from feedback I included a gun shooting ink which would later reveal the silhouette of the man. This simple addition drastically improved the scene. The man was at first a still image but using a technique of where you puppet an image which maps the the joints of an image forming a quick 2D rig that can be manipulated and animated just like I did in the scene. This tool is extremely useful of making your images come to life, but just like rigging in Maya your joints will sometimes drag unnecessary points and the only way to fix that is to create more joints to separate the image points, this does solve the problem but it makes the joints a lot more tedious to animate. The cross was modeled and animated using dynamics in Maya; rendered in software engine to preserve time as it will be a silhouette. The waves was the hardest thing to do;

I first tried downloading a bunch of stock footage of ripples and the adjusting the contrast, levels, and other features but none of them created the effect that I was looking for. I resorted to using After Effect's wave world, which is a simulation of where you create wave, ripples, and other water related simulations. I made the impact point in the exact same position as the cross and added some distortion. This made an illusion of the cross causing the ripples and then with some simple tweaked to the color of the height of water created and made it even better than what I hoped for.

Section 2

Each word had its separate layers which allowed me to scale them towards the middle separately. I shattered the words using pixel polly, and manipulated it to make the match thje snow in be background as much as possible, then later slowly fading out to give the illusion of the words becoming the snow. The snow in the background is a simulation made in after effects where I tweaked the frequency, size and visibility of the petals; to make the petals gradually appear, I made their opacity slowly increase from 0 to 100. To make the petals grow and fill the screen I actually added a glow which gradually increased to fill the majority of the screen. This also gave me more control and made sure that no black spaces were left over. Unfortunately due to the nature of video compression and you tube the snow appears pixelated and the only way to fix that was to render in a much higher resolution.

Section 3

I downloaded the ink splatters from the website Mitch Martinez that produces free 4k stock footage such as ink drops, water, smoke and may more. This scene focuses on utilizing the green screen recordings by allowing the ink drops to reveal the white silhouettes. This scene follows the intro style of James Bond a lot more closely in comparison to the other scenes, this is too make sure that the person watching knows that it's an intro for James Bond and the scenes before is just unique to this movie. The next scene continues on using the green screens this time whole screen being able to display silhouettes it allowed me to shatter the characters that were killed or did a significant action. The shatter was made in the same way the text explosion.

Final

,

Before this project I really disliked after effects and thought that you can do all the same things on sony vegas and it'll even be easier, but the more I used After Effects the greater was my appreciation to the software, I slowly uncovered the strengths and what After Effects is meant to be used for; rather than using many videos in a linear fashion after effects works best with shorter clips with many layers of clips to create complex effects.


Overall the project had actually turned out better than I hoped for, I had lower expectations than usual due to me not being confident in the software. My ideas were drastically changed where I started noticing what the software is made for, but I still stuck to the overall theme of using silhouettes. Using complex effects such as simulations and wave world my confidence really grew in video editing and gave a much larger freedom to create what I want. After Effects is obviously great with effects but it's a lot more challenging to match up content with music, because of this I had to make sure I don't go over the time limit and I can get the title on the screen when the music calms down. To do this I made each scene a bit shorter  which did work in the final version, but I had to insert the eye I made from before to fill that space up.

The 3rd section doesn't look that great because the lighting of the green-screen wasn't the best and in combination of the quite low res camera caused for a blurry silhouette which ruins the the scene. The restriction of using black and white really made that scene hard to manage as the ink drops were all black and to make it clear that more ink has dropped would be hard. My range of green screen footage was also limited as a lot of shots at some point were clipping out of the screen or the shot simply did not cover the whole person.

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