Red Giant QuickTip #39: Fairytale Lighting in After Effects

In this tutorial Harry Frank demonstrates how to take a regular, run-of-the-mill shot and turn it into something beautiful and moody, straight out of a fairy tale. You’ll learn how to set up a down-and-dirty 3D track,  add volumetric light and dust to a live action shot, and then finish it with some simulated camera lens blur.

Related Links:

• Buy Trapcode Particular
• Buy Trapcode Shine
• Visit Harry’s website

Between Bears – Eran Hilleli

We recently noted that Eran Hilleli won the Best Animation Vimeo Festival Award (2010) for his work on “Between Bears.” In his post, Eran mentioned that he used Trapcode Particular for part of this project, so we asked him if he could break it down a little more to explain where and how it was used:

“I used Trapcode Particular and Trapcode Form three times throughout my project. First, at the beginning, where the bear is shaving his hand. All of the flying and falling triangles were made with Trapcode. Also later in the film [3:41 - 3:49], when diving down toward the white bear there is a splash of Trapcode. The last tiny bit is when all the pointy headed dwarves are walking, you can see tiny specs which were made with Trapcode [2:27].”

This project was Eran Hilleli’s graduation film at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Since graduating, Eran has picked up various freelance gigs and tries his best to carve out some time to continue his own creative projects. See more of his great work at http://eranhilleli.com/.

Original music composed by Ori Avni
Performed by Ori Avni and Daniela Spector

“We had to revise the video after the color grade was delivered and drop in new big chunks of video segment that the colorist never touched. The colorist used Resolve and we used Looks to match those new segments without skipping a beat!”

If you’ve been following us on twitter or have been keeping up with the blog, you may have caught that we’re making a short film. In his search for some gear for the shoot, our director Seth Worley, pointed out this video of an as of yet unreleased Lens Filter from Vid-Atlantic Media Production that can give a standard DSLR lens some of the qualities of an anamorphic lens.

From the guys at Vid-Atlantic: “What it does is mimic characteristics of anamorphic lenses such as the flare or streak and vertically stretched bokeh. It’s very easy to use and allows you to rack focus your photo lens like normal. This is a HUGE plus as shooting with real anamorphic attachments requires you to focus both the anamorphic lens and the photographic lens, making run and gun shooting pretty much impossible.”

I did some research, and it turns out that they are primarily in the business of shooting music videos and promotional content for electronic artists and DJs – not primarily in the business of hardware. In fact, In 2009, Vid-Atlantic won the highest honor for a music video, a coveted MTV VMA Moon-man for Best Dance Video. Below is their music video demo reel:

About the video, Eddie Enciu, from Vid-Atlantic said: “We’ve used many products in the past from apples color to even recently the resolve, but we’ve settled on Colorista II and Magic Bullet Looks as our drugs of choice now. I’ve used Magic Bullet since 2004. 75% or more of that video had either Magic Bullet Looks or Trapcode Starglow. Lately I’ve been using the Magic Bullet Denoiser since losing a few f-stops when shooting with our CineMorph filter, and our partner team and us are experimenting making a music video mainly using sound keys.”

Their videos are all airing globally on music video networks including MTV, mainly doing work for Spinnin Records and Vicious Records for their US based superstar Producer/DJ Ian Carey. They just wrapped the latest video with Snoop Dogg, using, among other things, Magic Bullet Looks to help create the color and mood. In fact, while some shots were graded with Davinci (with Looks added for even more mood), Eddie tells me: “We had to revise the video after the color grade was delivered and drop in new big chunks of video segment that the colorist never touched. The colorist used Resolve and we used Looks to match those new segments without skipping a beat!”

Trapcode Form, Echospace and 3D Stroke were also used for the high-paced motion graphics seen in the video below.

So, how do a bunch of Music Video guys got into selling hardware?

“Our products are simply a spin-off from all of our experimenting on music videos and other productions. We’ve had to build our own products and later we get bombarded with requests to have them made for others who want to use similar tools. We developed a small 35mm adapter years ago before DSLRs but now it has become popular as we were the first to mount SLR lens on the iPhone 4 via the OWLE bubo. The clamps came about from our frustration of anamoprhic lenses never being able to mount correctly. And now the CineMorph filter has also come about because of the inability to rack focus and shoot run n gun using real anamorphic lens combos. It was really meant as a companion to real anamorphic shooting but for those selective focusing type shots. Everyone has gotten used to the same ol’ spherical look of DSLRs so anamorphics are making a comeback and interest is growing.”

Check out the Vid-Atlantic Media Production website to learn more.

Red Giant QuickTip #35: Kaleidoscopic Effects with Trapcode Form

In this QuickTip, Aharon Rabinowitz explores the Kaleidospace features of Trapcode Form to create 3D mirrored kaleidoscopic effects.

If you liked this tutorial, check out my popular Trapcode Form City tutorial.

Buy Trapcode Form HERE.

Author’s note: This post is a combo of both a user story and tutorial. Check out the visuals, and then watch the tutorial at the bottom… it’s worth it.

Recently, I was checking out Vimeo, and I found this amazing Lovett music video, called Eye of the Storm, that is a beautiful blend of both live-action and CGI:

Personally, I’ve never been into the Steam-punk thing, but this is such a great piece of visual storytelling with a great soundtrack, it’s quickly become one of my favorite pieces produced in recent time.

I watched this fantastic “Making Of” video and caught that one of our customers, Wes Ball, of OddBall Animation, headed up the visual Effects.

Trapcode Suite Products used were: Particular, 3D stroke, Starglow, and Shine for atmosphere.

Wes told me he did the lightning with Trapcode Particular and 3D stroke, so I asked him if he would do a QuickTip on that. He was kind enough to oblige, and here it is:

Red Giant QuickTip #33: Particular Lightning Bolt

Wes has taught at fxphd, and if you check out the OddBall Animation website, you’ll find a lot of his company’s work, including some amazing 3D shots Wes is working on for personal projects, as well as a fantastic roto reel. Definitely worth checking out!

I asked Wes, why he uses Red Giant’s products and he said: “The short and sweet answer; Red Giant gets us to final faster.”

Personally, I can’t think of a better reason.

Announcing Trapcode From 1.1.1 :

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/trapcode-form/updates/

This update to Form fixes several issues, including:

• Loading older projects or using presets caused ram-preview, undo, and orthographic views to have problems.
• Odd moire patterns in dense particle grids.

As always, you can find updates for all of our products here: http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/downloads/updates/

IMPORTANT: This fixes bugs found only in the CS5 version of Trapcode Form. If you are using Form in CS4 or older, you do not need to download this update.

Mattias Peresini, AKA Mattrunks has been at it again, creating some brilliant FREE Red Giant People presets for Trapcode products.

Download it HERE from Red Giant People.

Recently, while searching for some good wholesome content on Vimeo, we came across this amazing music video full of compositing work done by Dan Blank:

We contacted Dan and here’s what he had to say about the importance of Red Giant products in his workflow:

Here’s a video showing some of the making of, including pre-visualization and compositing – plus a few money saving tips:

The mega-talented Mattias Peresini has added 4 new presets to Red Giant People that use Trapcode Form and Trapcode Particular:

An experiment with Trapcode Form and After Effects, with an abstract 3D Shape looking like an hourglass, ‘Sablier’ in french. I’ve been playing with a lot of Depth of Field and typos too. You can download the project file for free HERE.

An experiment with Trapcode Form and After Effects, playing with a colorful and abstract shape in 3D space.You can download the project file for free HERE.

An experimen with Trapcode Particular based on the random grid expression by Dan Ebberts. You can download the project file for free HERE.

An experiment with the new Shading options of Trapcode Particular 2.
A simple setup with 2 null object and 8 light emitter in a pseudo cube for a 3D look render! You can download the project file for free HERE.

Don’t forget to check out his tutorials Trapcode tutorials if you want to learn some of his techniques.

In this very special 50th episode of Red Giant TV, Red Giant’s own Harry Frank will show you how to destroy the city of Los Angeles through an alien attack. He’ll explore compositing, both 2D and 3D tracking, color correction and visual effects techniques that will blow your mind. Here is the final render:

In addition to After Effects, Harry will be using Mocha for AE (which ships with AE CS4+) and Camera Tracker, the new 3D camera matching software from the The Foundry.

Watch the episode HERE.