MattHawkins Online - Film Making Forum

Cool! That info will help me get over my fear of doing it

Lol! When I was about 13 we were making a Sci-Fi film, and we created lazer shots by getting lazer pointers (which we got in Spain 'cus it was during all that bad publicity they were getting over here and shops stopped selling them) and spraying deodrant across the lazer and speeding it up.

Try drawing them in Paint Shop Pro's Animation Shop! Although I'm not sure if it'd look any good =/

Doing a lazer shot would be a pretty easy thing to do in Paint Shop Pro's Animation Shop (comes with PSP, which is avaliable on several cover disks).

Don't use it to do Lightsabers though! Drawing them frame by frame really is horrible (I thought it'd be the easiest way of doing it, I was wrong...).

You can get rid of shadows in After Effects, just use a secondary colour and select the shadow area. And you'll be better off using 3D Studio Max's particle system! You'll have more freedom and control using a 3D environment. But at the end of the day it's your decition! If you do get it let me know...

I think Green's the best for home movies... And blue clothes are more common than green!

Plus, there's less obvious colour bleeding with green when using older cameras.

Editing, yeah definately Premiere for the PC platform. Avid is the industry standard but I still feel Premiere is better (god knows why Avid's are used so much). Effects, After Effects. Combustion is equally as good but After Effects works well with Premiere and the filters are pretty much backwards...

Lol! Sounds fantastic!!!

Ok to be fair I only had 48 megs of Ram and an old copy of 3D Studio when I did Shosk, and it was a shot which had several particles and high res textures! It wasn't even that great a shot either, it was just long. I also did a long shot of CGI blood coming out of someones neck in a horrific shaving...

Very cool! In fact I feel like doing that myself! Couldn't you have just used a dummy for the external shots?

There was a brilliant greenscreen tutorial in Computer Arts magazine once. I don't think their tutorial is online but the website for the film they were doing is http://spam.tux.nu - Features a very cool diary, worth reading... I also prefer green, especially as most of my mates who I film with choo...

What's stopping you from doing it overnight?

Reminds me of a 13 second shot in Shosk that took 17 hours to render...

I have a muzzle flash example on my Shosk website, although seeing as though half the videos are currently dead links on there at the moment, take a look at the trailer on this old pageof mine:

www.geocities.com/websiteparadiso

Just scroll down the page a tad and click on the TRAILER.

I absolutely love Premiere! Final Cut Pro's better for shifting and rearranging stuff, but it's Premiere all the way for me.

As for muzzle flashes, I always found it easier to draw them on with Paint Shop Pro's Animation Shop.

The latest Combustion and After Effects are pretty much on par with each other. New versions of Combustion set the new standards, then Adobe just copy the new functions for their new version of AE

After Effects is pretty much the industry standard when it comes to desktop PC effectwork.

Meh... Avoid cgi imagery if possible, stick to compositing the real stuff.

Do you work for Microsoft or something?

It's ok, I rarely update my sites these days so I can't complain!

:D When I think of them, I'll let you know! But make sure you take many shots of the rain coming from different angles. You don't wanna be superimposing the same shot over every single shot. It'll be like in cartoons where they can't be arsed to animate the rain so they use about 3 cels of it in a l...

Lol! I was examining the site earlier to see if there were any pics of it up

In after effects the way I would do it would be to film some rain in the dark with a bright light shining on it (or you could always pour a watering can in front of the camera, seeing as though you live in a place where you can't rely on rain occuring every single day :D). Then use this layer to sup...

If you think adding computer graphics on top of live action footage is gonna be easy, think again!

There's a couple of tutorial type things on my website which you may find useful (that'll be www.shosk.creators.co.uk )

Actually they did a simular thing in Indiana Jones. They kept to a slow speed and when you shoot it close up it looks pretty fast.

3D Studio Max, in the film sense, is more of an animation package. It'll do particles and what not... But it's designed to be used for making realistic looking objects, and animating them. Combustion is a post production package, where you can do all the blue screen and colour balance gubbins... The...

Ugh! No don't use Premiere! A 3D package would be a lot better, but if you can do something in camera, do it in camera... Doing it digitally will always look fake.