FMP ‘Red Dawn’ Process 04

This is the last chapter of this project, I have mixed feelings when I write this Blog, on the one hand it is to celebrate the completion of the graduation design, and on the other hand it is also because my school life is coming to an end, and it is a whole new phase of my life.I would like to thank all my teachers first of all, you all made me play a positive role in my professional ability, and make students feel very tolerant in teaching, and also always have a very cheerful attitude towards life, you are more like a friend, help us to play a better role in planning our career path.This chapter is about the remaining bits and pieces of the production process as well as the revision process, and at the end, two ends of the video will be put up, one for the director’s version and one for the abridged version.
Those who don’t like it or don’t want to see it can not watch it, because in fact after the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict many European countries have made movies or films based on the war, and these works don’t try to remove some parts of it deliberately.

History is history and we can’t deny its existence.

First of all, I did a complete redo of the composite shot of the tank, as the previous one had a lot of issues that needed to be modified from scratch. This time I made very fine adjustments to the Mask of the trees, then I adjusted the material of the tank (giving it a new Normal map), adjusted the angle of the tank as well as added some real life features of the T-90, such as the very iconic infrared detection lights and the green laser aiming lines, which were all made in C4D

*The green laser as well as the infrared light are animated*

Moving on to the second issue from last time, there was a stretching of the right view of the tank when moving, I realized this was due to the fact that there was a bush in front of the tank, so I used Keyer to draw in the green color of this section individually as well as Luminance to get a composite Alpha, and then used Grade to adjust the contrast of the Alpha, otherwise there may have been a portion of the foliage running through to the middle of the center of the tank, the image below shows the Alpha channel of the bush

The part actually flickers a bit in the RGBA channel, this is because I used phone to shoot this part so the resolution is lower, if you shoot with a camera you can fix this, I tried using AI repair to expand the pixels but it still looks like a mosaic

Moving on to the character part, I changed the texture of the soldier to 4k and made the soldier no longer stand on the side of the road but on the far side of the screen, this circumvents a lot of problems as this is after all a free model so it’s not of the highest quality, I’ve learnt from this lesson this time and after that it’s better to use a MetaHuman or any other high-quality model in the compositing workflow. On the color of the clothes, in order to make him look the same as the character in the foreground, I put the original material as well as the texture of the clothes in PS and added the texture by sucking the color of the original image directly into the texture

And I made a new animation for the soldier’s skeleton, now the character is on the ground all the time, the reason why the shadows were weird in the previous version was because one of the character’s feet was floating all the time

Then Alwin finished some parts, I checked the files and there are some problems with them, for example, the circled parts of this scene on the left side have Mask problems, the problem on the right side is that the airplane is too far down, I want the airplane to be the main character of the shot, so it should be in the golden section line

Then I made all the voiceovers using AI and replaced the parts that were previously recorded directly from the game, which is now completely free of hidden copyright issues

*ElevenLabs is reallllllllllllllllllllllllllllly good*

Then Manos made some suggestions for my project, starting with the beginning part, to which I added particle effects and made this part of the metal look redder and added some other effects.

*I also added another layer of lens halo effect to it*

Then came the color changes to the forest scenes, in the previous version I didn’t have these shots colorized in NUKE, I just added a color grading to them in Pr, so they would look out of color with the rest of the section, now I’ve re-exported them and put them where they were. Also, the previous version of PART2 was way too long, and I realized this was a serious problem, and when I re-edited it, I deleted one scene and shortened the three other shots, so in total, this part is maybe 8-10 seconds shorter now

Then there was the issue with the color in Part4, there was some color difference between the first and second shot, I then looked at both shots in NUKE and found that indeed the right one would be a bit more yellow, which I had not noticed at all during the production. So I readjusted the Grade on the right part to add a little bit of light blue and removed the one node that was making it so yellow

In the process of adjusting, I found that the high temperature effect of the airplane in the previous version was not very good, so I changed a way to make it, this time I used Noise to control the flow of high temperature and added animation effects to it, in order to make it look real, I made a blur effect to it after making the Roto, and of course this blur has a shape, for example, it will be very big at the tail, and smaller on the two sides

Then I started to create the sound effect part, I have to declare one thing first, all the sound FX effects appearing in the work are open source free material, basically from a Chinese sound effect website, which has a lot of free resources made by individual artists. In the bullet time FX, a lot of the sounds I didn’t find, so I found an AI website that can generate sound FX, the effects it generates may not be the best, but at least it can synchronize the video with the sound

Then came the tweaks to the National Theater shot, in the previous version there were too few elements within this shot, only the three Soviet flags and some camera effects were special effects. So I added some other elements to it. The first was the effect of the missile flight as well as the explosion, as this shot was preceded by a background sound that said there was a missile attack on London. Then I also created a shockwave of the explosion. The steps to do this were to first suck the Luminance out of the screen, then create a rough Roto to cover the sky portion, then to make the explosion look more realistic I animated the Roto of the houses in the distant city so that the explosion would hit more places over time instead of just sticking to it like a sticker. For the shockwave part, I used a Gizmo that controls the screen to produce a similar wobble, it’s actual purpose is to create a heat effect, and I did multiple animations to simulate the jittery feeling of a real shockwave

Here is not the final result, here are some more questions

Then Alwin’s Naval Battle section is all done, here’s how I added effects to it.I added motion blur, generic filters, and frame noise to the firing scene (these are effects that are applied to all of the naval battle footage) I optimized the explosions by taking the brightest part of the explosions and controlling that part individually to create a Glow effect. For the sound, I synthesized the sound of five shells firing in AE and had it matched to the image

Next is the effect of the ship shield, this part of our original plan was to make the whole process in Houdini, but time is running out, if it is the whole process in houdini then the effect of the sea battle part can be at least twice as perfect, but this will take about 1.5 months. I couldn’t find any suitable copyright-free magic shield material here, so I had to buy a commercial resource to avoid copyright issues, because this works so well. In the process, I first used Heatwave’s Gizmo to do a heatwave effect on the shield’s location, so that it looks like there aren’t just particles inside the shield, but that there is indeed a layer of walls. Next, I drew an area with Roto to have Heatwave act only on this area, of course this Roto is animated because the shield spawns and the process of spawning requires an animation. Then I did a glow as well as a motion blur for the particle effect

*Here’s the final result in Pr, which I personally think is pretty good*

Then there’s the shot of the missile being fired, to which I added this magic shield as well, but this time there will also be an explosion effect of a missile hitting the shield, this effect is a free clip from ActionFX. In NUKE I matched the color of the background and when I started compositing, I noticed that the clip had a black edge, probably because of a missing step in the Unpremult process when making the clip export, so I solved the problem by subtracting 1 pixel point of Alpha using an Erode node.

In fact, the effect is not very good, because the general explosion will also produce smoke, this material does not have, and I want the material angle is more tricky, because the missile is in the side of the explosion, if there is time in the HOUDINI can become better

Then I synthesized more sound effects in Pr, such as the sound of the fighter jets flying over in this previous shot, so I won’t play each one here

Moving on to the first shot of the Alwin naval battle, I traced and 2D-tracked the four parts of the instrument panel in the plane, then put a fire control radar on it and added a Glow effect to it, which ended up looking so effective that you can’t tell it’s hovering when it’s being illuminated by the Glow

Then there was the process of creating the Concept poster, I mainly used some material from the project for the background and mimicked the typography of a lot of famous movie posters, and on the FX side I processed it many times in PhotoMosh after it was made to add some sense of war atmosphere, and I exported it in a GIF format.I may also be ready to use this image as the front of a business card.