Image Processing Reference
In-Depth Information
exercise with the flying saucer in After Effects that Jeff Sias described. You
need to get the hearts and the cotton shoots onto an alpha channel, so
they can be matched up and scaled to the pixilation footage. Placing the
hearts in the young man's eyes requires some placement transforming
(moving the heart around in the close-up shot of the young man), scaling,
and possibly some color correction or opacity adjustments. Once the
young man opens his eyes, then start growing hearts. When he closes his
eyes, you can reduce the heart series, quickly making sure that the heart
looks like it stays behind the eyelid. Then, as the young man continues to
look offscreen in that first shot, start the cotton steam effect and let it cycle
in the vibration mode. Reverse the cotton growth, then cut to the close-up
of the girl. You might reduce the opacity of the cotton layer to help make it
look a little more like steam.
ExErcisE Fig 7.H
Two shots of the cotton replacements used as a steam effect coming out of the
young man's ears.
Once this is complete, you need to go to the final shot of the couple gliding
away. This is where a trail of hearts is left behind them as they exit from
the camera. These hearts can be the same cycle that you used in the eyes
repeated randomly around the frame. They can be scaled and duplicated
five or six times. Each heart can grow on and either reverse the growth at the
end or dissolve off. This can be done in After Effects or even Photoshop on a
frame-by-frame basis. Think about an appropriate sound track. It could add
great value to the exercise.
If the camera move at the beginning is too rough for your taste, then you may
apply some stabilizing tracking by slightly blowing up the frames and finding
some tracking points to lock onto to smooth out the track-in. Once this is
complete, the shots need to be exported from After Effects and brought into
Final Cut or a comparable editing program. Make your edits (cutting on the
action of the young man getting up from the bench). You might consider a
fade-up in the beginning and a fade-out at the end. There are many variations
that you can make to this exercise. It is just a kicking-off spot for you to
consider when trying to mix and match techniques in a unified film. Have fun
with
Love at First Sight
!
