MattHawkins Online - Film Making Forum

Most of the blood in The Forest (http://www.secret7000.com) was digital; we spat gobs of food colouring at pieces of green card, keyed out the green and match-moved it to our actor. I think it looked great! You just need to take your time.

Here's my attempt: http://www.secret7000.com/mastermike/CloneBattle.WMV Masking in After Effects and some colour correction. The only thing I'm not pleased with is the change of the curtains to the right at the end. The timing was almost spot on when I rehearsed it; I had to fudge it slightly but it...

If anyone hasn't seen our "The Forest", with special effects featuring heavily with cloning, muzzle flashes, bullet hits and 3D, have a look now at http://www.secret7000.com We've written and storyboarded two sequels. The original is going to be renamed "The Forest: Death or Beer"...

Just stick lightsabers on Kill Bill.

This spoof will be a short film, I envisage it lasting around 15 minutes or less. It's not really going to follow the story particularly, more poke fun at individual scenes. The greenscreen is setup, we've cobbled together a fantastic Frodo costume. Pictures will be up soon, and I'll keep everyone p...

I drew my muzzle flashes in Photoshop, then composited them in After Effects.

Er .. how do you mean? Like the on-the-fly chromakeying on stuff like news reports and the weather? That's done in hardware. Software would be much too slow for live broadcasting.

It was a nightmare on The Forest, we shot on a day with patchy cloud so all the clones looked different. With some cross-fading of various bits of the plates, and brightness/contrast adjustment in post, we got it looking alright. Make sure your camera settings are locked down and shoot on an evenly ...

We used Detonation Films stock footage in The Forest. With the right transfer mode it worked a treat.

For The Forest (see the gallery) we used an airsoft. Worked fine, although for the sequel we'll be using something more realistic so we get the weight right.

I'm going to write an After Effects tutorial about more complex cloning soon - hopefully tonight, with any luck.

Use some detonation films stock footage overlayed into your footage, works a treat

I'd personally do it with a combination of 3D Studio Max, After Effects and Photoshop. Might do a test later, actually...

That's pretty poor. I've done MUCH better myself.

No, technically, the only thing that stops us being professional is the fact that we don't make money from our films. Most of my films have better cinematography than Blair Witch Project, but that's technically a "professional" production, because it made a lot of money for those involved.

Quite simple with the right software. He held the frame up to his head. At a certain frame in the film, a 3D compositor took what was in the frame, turned it into a digital image and rotoscoped this image so it appeared in the frame. The same thing was done with the paper. Time consuming, but an imp...

Either or. Essentially the same thing.

Another visitor of TFN Fanfilms forums

I'm Lord_Charisma on there. I saw your test footage there, and even as it stands it's pretty good as a proof-of-concept. With some more animation sequences, a load of dust layers and some smoother compositing, it'll look pretty amazing.

It's where you paint onto your footage using vectors, oddly enough. It's quite well implemented in After Effects, we paintbrushed our Simons frame-by-frame a pure white, then changed the composite mode of the vector painting to matte, and bingo, you've got a Simon without a background.

You'd build a 3d model of your actor and hand-rotoscope each frame to match the actor's movements, then apply an animated texture effect to the model.

Have a look at The Forest at http://www.secret7000.com For this , I drew pictures of wounds in Photoshop, and also we filmed some blood splats against green card that we could key out. We then motion-tracked these to our clone's bodies, sometimes using After Effects's motion tracking software, and s...

Or you can paint 'em out frame-by frame.

A simple green screen would have made some of our work on The Forest so much easier! Ah, it took us forever to do the cloning shots in that. It was mostly masking and vector painting. The main cloning shot took us about 3 months. Hard work but the effort paid off in the end.

When we made The Forest, we used AfterEffects and a combination of masking and vector painting to get all the Simons on screen at the same time.

The term comes from the old-school "Matte Paintings" which were simply paintings places behind the actors, so called because they had to be painted in non-glossy matte paint, to avoid reflection from the studio lights. These days, yes, it is generally regarded as the area your software def...