I recently entered a crazy video competition with some friends. The theme was to bring an outdoor activity inside – and what better outdoor activity is there than a good old Duck Shooting session – with machines guns – in the house.

At the time of writing, the competition is still running, so PLEASE go and have a watch of our two minute crazy fun video and please press the ‘VOTE’ button underneath it.

http://win.hitachiheatpumps.co.nz/user/35

While putting this together I wanted to add the muzzle flashes to the guns and also some exposure hits when the muzzle flashes went off. I was already key framing the muzzle flashes and I didn’t want to key frame exposure hits as well. This got me thinking about expressions and how I could use the ‘brightness’ of one layer to drive a value in another layer.

The expression

I did a bunch of research and here’s what I came up with.

exposure = effect("Exposure")(3);
multiplier = 2;

driverLayer = thisComp.layer("MuzzleFlash");
samplePoint = [0,0];
sampleSize = [1280,720];

lightnessSample = driverLayer.sampleImage(samplePoint,sampleSize);
driverLightness = rgbToHsl(lightnessSample)[2];

exposure = driverLightness * multiplier;

How it works

So – for this to work you need a single layer with the muzzle flashes – the way I created the muzzle flashes was to buy Video Copilots Action Essentials kit – then I timed the flashes to the underlying video clip – when I had the flashes timed up (I think there were about 5 for this shot) – I then selected all the muzzle flash layers and pre-composed them into a new comp called ‘MuzzleFlash’.

Then I added an adjustment layer above everything and applied the exposure effect to that. You then twirl down the effect properties and add the expression above to the “Master / Exposure” property.

Now be warned – it can take a while to compute. What it basically does is, every frame, it works out the average luminance of the entire Muzzle Flash clip – it then returns a number which we can use to drive our exposure value.

I added the multiplier into the expression so I could get a little more control over the intensity of the exposure hit.

I also found this worked really well as I could duplicate the exposure layer and mask off parts of the actor or surfaces that might be even brighter still – that gave a bit more of an illusion that there really was light emitting from these flashes and lighting up the scene.

Close up of the expression and layers

So for this shot (unfinished above but you get the idea) we wanted to try and simulate some petrol splashing up out of the petrol tank.

I chose to use trapcode particular to help with this as I didn’t have the time or budget to learn something like realflow and I’m pretty pleased with the result.

To get this sort of fluid look I set up trapcode particular until I got the particles squirting around in a fluidish motion, then precomped the particular layer and added the CC Glass effect to the precomp.

I did a bit of experimenting with the settings for CC Glass and found that these ones seemed to work quite nicely for this effect .. but obviously you can tweak yours to whatever suits your scene.

If you have any other tips for creating water or fluid using trapcode particular I would be keen to hear them.

This is a quick color grade for a short film that I’m working on with a good friend. We green screened the car in front of our garage door then took a quick drive up the road to grab some footage for the background plate. Composited in After Effects and graded with mojo and colorista.

Here’s the video

One of my friends is an amazing guitarist and he asked me for a bit of help in creating a concert sequence for his next music video for his band, AppMantis.

I thought that sounded like a lot of fun and I had been hanging out to do something a bit creative again.

After a couple of months on and off in the evenings, and with lots of help from tutorials from Andrew Kramer and Nick Campbell, I’m happy to say that we got it nailed.

The concert sequence that I worked on kicks off at about 3:45 but go and listen to the whole track. It’s quite catchy and I think Baz and Simon have done a stellar job for something that had pretty much a zero dollar budget. Watch AppMantis – “Here for You” on Youtube and, if you like it, please click the LIKE button (on YouTube) for them.

I recently had the opportunity to work with the nice folk over at Wave Design. They had a design for a one of their clients web sites and needed some help getting it from paper to pixels.

I put this nice simple site together in WordPress and their customer can easily maintain it themselves.

Check out the actual site here: http://yrw.co.nz

Some friends and I entered a competition to create a video for the Comvita Science Challenge. We had a huge amount of fun and quite a few late nights … but we’re really stoked with the end result so please go and take a look and if you have a vimeo account (which is free hint hint) then give us a big ol heart (like).

UPDATE: We Won!

Just a really quick update as I’ve been very quiet posting here lately. It’s the virtually the end of March and this year is zooming on past.

Firstly, I’m still super busy wrapping up a couple of client web design / development projects. That’s keeping me busy far too late into the evenings but the projects are rewarding and the end results will be great.

Secondly, I’ve extended my contract with local software company, Cucumber. They’re a great bunch of folk and I’m very much enjoying working on some high profile projects with them. There is some great stuff coming out of that company and it’s nice to play a role there.

Thirdly is Sentinel Server & Website Monitoring. This started out as a project with a good friend and long time business associate, Tim Philips. It’s going form strength to strength and its continued development is the major reason why I wont be accepting any new clients for a while. We’ve done some amazing things with this piece of software and we have some solid direction for it’s future. We’re getting really positive feedback and, to once again be involved in developing something special is extremely exciting.

Lastly, video production, vfx and motion graphics, are continuing to excite and enthrall me. I’ve been working on numerous small video projects here and there and have recently been approached by 3 separate agencies looking for After Effects freelancers. Guys, once the smoke clears, I would be more than happy to chat with you further about AE freelance work. Thanks very much for taking the time to make contact.

Here’s a quick experiment with Adobe After Effects and Optical Flares (from Videocopilot). I captured this quick video on my iPhone on a recent stroll around Mt Maunganui. The sun was going down throwing a stunning gold light over everything and Ash couldn’t resist a quick paddle in the water.

When I got home, I checked out the video and was pretty impressed with how it came out. Not a bad little camera on the iPhone. However, it didn’t quite have that ‘golden times’ feel that I wanted. That meant it was time to crack into some After Effects

Making a sunset

So the first thing I wanted was a real sunset look. And for that, I needed a sun. Enter Optical Flares from Video Copilot.

I tracked the video clip with After Effects built in tracker and that gave me a position to fix the lens flare to. I had a couple of small issues with Ash running in front of my tracking points and the tracker getting confused.  The way that I got around that was to make 3 tracks, attach them to null objects and parent them together. It seemed to do the job quite nicely.

Once I had that tracking data, I created a new solid in AE and applied Optical Flares to it. I chose one of the presets and changed a few of the elements around (must buy that new Pro-Presets 2 pack) to get the look that I wanted.

Then I created a new light and parented that to the 3d null object that held the tracking data. That made the light move along with the video but a problem that I had was that the actual sun was off the edge of the clip .. it wasn’t visible for the vast majority of the shot.  So I had to move my light off to the edge of the clip about where I figured the sun would be. By using a simple expression I could leave the light moving with the clip and the move it about 400px on the x axis to push it off to the side. All good.

Finishing the look

I’d love to say that I spent a reasonable amount of time creating the right color look. But I didn’t. I just opened up Magic Bullet Looks and chose one of the presets. I dropped the saturation a little and fiddled with another couple of settings and until I was happy with it. Took about 5 minutes. No real manual colour adjustment necessary.

I then added a subtle vignette and some film grain and rendered it out.

Nice and easy and a great way to kill an hour or so doing something creative with video.

Check out the video here.

I’m really happy to announce that the new Bay of Plenty Wedding Guide website is now live.

I worked with the team at Full Flavour Media on this one and we’re all very happy with the way the first release has turned out.

This site makes extensive use of the really handy jQuery Tools tool set to help with the scrolling and overlays as well as another great little plugin to handle the popup images. All very snazzy indeed.

So if you’re from around these parts and planning on tying the knot then I recommend checking out the Bay of Plenty Wedding Guide for a run down on who does what, when and where.

Apologies for the lack of new material here. I know my 4 avid readers are missing out

I’m currently doing a bunch of work with the great folk over at Cucumber Software in Tauranga. That’s keeping my busy for at least 4 days / week.

I’m also investing a heck of a lot of time into Sentinel as well as working my way through a backlog of client work.

At the moment I’m not taking on any new clients but you are more than welcome to drop me a line and I may be able to recommend someone for you.

All the best and thanks for bearing with me.

Mark