I have been working on the Blog about FMP since 11.5, this project started in September, as I have been planning this project for a long time. However, many of the processes involved were not documented at that time, so many of my previous processes may be relatively less documented here, but I’ll still try my best to introduce some more.
Project: Red Dawn
This post will record some of the current fragmented production process as well as the project introduction, etc., the specific synthesis steps and scene setup will be placed in Part2, this post only at the end of the production process will include the production process of the bullet time version 1.0 and the production process of the satellite scene (because of the relatively short)
This project was inspired by a project I created two years ago, a 3D animated short film about anti-colonialism and hegemony, in which I used aliens as colonizers, invading the Earth as a form of neo-colonialism, and I researched a lot of history, mainly the history of ancient countries and explored the issue of absolutes of human historical development.For this project I focused on the Ukrainian War and used it as a blueprint to create a virtual story of World War III, here is my story and a short version of it at the end
Next, in September, I gathered a lot of inspiration from many special effects movies, and many of these shots also became the object of study for this project in later stages
Later I drew this storyboard again, the order of which might be a bit problematic because I didn’t follow the actual sequence of the shots, because I did a lot of modifications to the overall story again in the process, for example, the shot of the bullet time changed many times, and in my production process, this project will actually be divided into 4 paragraphs, and I’ll introduce the meanings of each chapter one by one later on
Here is the line list for the video, before this week it was planned that I would get 3 voice actors to voice my work, but I ended up canceling that plan due to the sensitive elements that may be involved in this project, I’ll be using AI dubbing later on, I’ve finished a few clips so far and I’ll be putting in some of the audio clips here
The next step was the audio production process, I used multiple platforms and software to create the sounds and BGM for this project
For the BGM, I chose a theme song from the Soviet DLC of the game HOI4 (Hearts of Iron IV), which is a new version of the Russian song – Katyusha – with a lot of futuristic elements, which gives the whole song a more lyrical and futuristic feel.I think it’s perfect for the beginning of this project
All the footage here was shot in China at the beginning of October, as it would have worked better considering the need to use a gun, but of course, I had already tried to do a shoot with green screen in my apartment in the UK once before that (bullet time), and that time the results were very poor, as the green screen was of very low quality, and NUKE or AE couldn’t get the green screen information right!
Here’s a shot for my real life footage, using the device iPhone 15Pro 4K 30FPS (I tried to shoot with my phone in the bullet time effect as well, but the phone produces some vignetting as well as too much noise no matter what)
Alwin and I also finished the green screen shoot at school last week, we rented LCC’s best cinema lens, the Blackmagic Mini 6K, which definitely provides a great foundation for post-production, and I’ve learned from the failure of my last shoot at home, so this one was fast, but there are still some very minor issues that may or may not be visible in postnot, unless one is very careful.
Here are the results of the first green screen shoot, you can notice that the green screen is very unclean, especially where the feet are, which can lead to a lot of problems (of course the main problem is that the folds of the fabric are too black, and my shoes are also black)
As the main person in charge of the project, I also wrote a detailed weekly worksheet, which I also make small changes based on actual difficulty
We also summarized his part in class this week in accordance with the storyboard, and we finalized all the subplots as well
In the section on utility assets, I created a Sheet of 3D assets so that it would be much easier for us to call them up in post, and of course, the main thing is the model of the T-90, because we need to use that asset both
Next is the process of video editing, I use Pr to make a rough cut of the video, some of the special effects shots will also use Pr in some plug-ins for production
For the title, I used C4D as well as Redshift, I created two materials, one to control the rust material and one to control the metal material, I then used a Mix material to blend these two effects
In the beginning of Part1, I referenced a lot of sci-fi movies as well as COD11: Future War, and some of their chapters were about satellites and the Earth, so I created a shot of a satellite as well, and that shot will be related to a later one as well, which I will write about in the Blog after Alwin finishes that shot, and it’ll be a hyper-realistic shot of a satellite’s perspective overlooking the Earth
Although this part below won’t be shown in the finished product, I think the steps of learning in it are also important, here are the detailed steps of how I used Maya as well as NUKE to create Bullet Time 1.0 (it’s really a shame that the quality of the final product is so poor, it took me a week to create them, like the rendering, filming, and creating the bullet’s movement trajectory all take time)
First after shooting, I noise reduced the video so the Keyer tool wouldn’t suck up the noise, then I tracked the footage and imported the information into Maya
Of course still shots can just skip this step, I processed the green screen directly using the IBK workflow but it didn’t work well, I also tried Keylight with similar results, but of course the best step to take is IBK (because my background was very cluttered)
I also use Primatte to enrich the workflow, this node can quickly pick up the colors to get BG and FG, I usually use it to get the Core area of the character, after picking up I will continue to use EdgeBlur and FilterErode to adjust the size and blurring degree of the Core area, this layer of the alpha channel is to copy (merge) to the bottom of the character after IBK or Keylight, because these two tools will remove the green color on the character as well.The purpose of this layer of alpha channel is to copy (merge) it to the bottom of the character after IBK or Keylight, because these two tools will remove the green color of the character, if you don’t add a layer of Core area then the alpha value of many places will not be 1
The overall node diagram is shown below
Next came the Maya part, I first looked for some house footage on Bridge and integrated it in Maya, then I also found a footage of a 9mm bullet on Sketchfab and added the position and firing animation to it in Maya, then I used the Bulley system to animate the drop, and then I imported the trackingI then imported the camera information for the tracking
I chose the EXR file when exporting because I needed to get the Depth information of the scene to create the focus effect, and I ended up adding motion blur to the bullets in Nuke