Final Project

The final project consisted of me shooting separate sporting events on greenscreen and compiling them into a short segment of what would be the best sports plays/moments. Originally shooting and wanting to edit 10 top sports moments time and other issues led me to make the TOP 5 best sports moments. My shooting schedule became varied and I had to shoot my actors separately for some of the team sports moments and edit them together into the same sport scene. The football one in particular took the longest to put together and time right for the snap. That one I shot one person at a time with only three of us going in different directions on the snap and duplicated and edited to make an offensive and defensive line. Here are screenshots from the greenscreen shoot of each of the 10 sports I was going to use.

Basketball - Was going to use two plays from the basketball scene:

Boxing:

Football:

-Offense

-Defense

-Hiking Center

-QB

Golf:

Skating:

Soccer:

Tennis:

UFC:

Wrestling:

I was also suppose to do some on location shooting to composite with the green screen footage. I was going to go to a soccer and football field to do the location shooting but scheduling and the greenscreen shoot took a majority of my time. Here are some of the mattes I Photoshoped and their originals.

UFC: Original/Finished

Boxing: Original/Finished

Football: Original/Finished

Soccer: Original/Finished

I ended up choosing Golf, Boxing, Soccer, Football, and the UFC for my top plays. A lot of time was spent on doing bunch of Photoshoping to make the mattes for compositing. Almost all the stills I had contained players in it and I had to remove them from the images for use. These were just a bunch of large images I found off the internet. Couldn't find any free stock sports footage, but that would of been great. Every ball used in the sports plays was animated except the football play. The soccer one in particular took a while to animate the ball being dribbled and hit and tossed around the player.

Here is my final video that I was able to edit in After Effects:

Rigging/Skinning/Animating

I rigged my previously created robot and added joints in order to animate him for a walk cycle. Skinning him was a little bit difficult cause some movements deformed the mesh and the mesh had to be weighted so that certain joints effect certain parts of the model's body. I animated a basic walk cycle and added an optical flare in After Effects so that his arm-gun can give off a glare.

Motion Tracking and Animation with 3D

I went ahead and chose a clip of Littlefield House with a swift camera movement of the sky. After using MatchMover, I tracked my previously made model of a robot and animated it flying across and toward the screen. In After Effects I had to do a little bit of additional compositing, but added some spark particles to make it seem that the robot has a little more life in his fly movement.

Final Project 1st Post

Pitch/Proposal:

For my final project I had the idea to do a parody of SportsCenter's Top 10. SportsCenter compiles the Top 10 plays of the day/week into a segment. I would like to do a similar segment but shoot it all on greenscreen and make it totally ridiculous and over the top. It will include explosions, smoke, fire, particles. I would also include titles and animated transitions between each of the plays. The idea also is for each play to get exponentially over the top as well.

Assets:
Matte Backgrounds - Multiple Angles
Images/Location Footage
-Soccer - Location
-Basketball - Images
-Boxing Ring - Images
-Golf - Footage/Images
-Football Stadium - Images
-Tennis - Images/Footage
-Wrestling Ring - Images
-Martial Arts Ring - Images

I will post storyboards and images as soon as they are all ready and compiled.

Schedule:
Week 1 - Preproduction/ compile images
Week 2 - Greenscreen shoot
Week 3 - Key footage and begin editing
Week 4 - Titles, Sound, Polish, Render

Shapes, Masks, and Mattes

I used some paint effects and animated some hands to fit what was being painted on the canvas. Using masks I animated it so it looked like what was being painted appeared on the canvas gradually. I had to mask out the curtain animation as well so that it showed the canvases behind it. With Photoshop I was able to edit and give a sketch and paint style for the images I used.

Greenscreen

I used a couple different clips to key out and made a weird jungle music video. I used an optical flare, turbulent displacement, turbulent noise to help make a teleportation effect for the wizard character. Used advanced lightning and glow so it looks like I am summoning multiple dancing Bens with my lightning. Motion tracking was also used and I had to use some masks to keep some of the effects contained.

3D in After Effects

I made this project specifically Star Wars themed. I started by making the stars and space atmosphere and used particle world. Then I moved a camera in z space through the particle field to give a warp speed effect. I also added some 3D layers of light textures that would give a galaxy atmosphere and added a lens flare to intensify this effect and as the camera passes through it the camera comes out of warp speed. I also put a 3D model of a tiefighter and animated it along with a photoshop file of the deathstar. I added a light to the deathstar to provide a more menacing look and animated the camera around the tiefighter.

Particles

I originally wanted to do a Terminator time travel effect but stumbled into the twirl setting in Particle World and found an easy way to create a tornado gust effect. I used several particles to make this composition one being the debris and paper elements swirling around. I added a vacuum effect as well to make particles kind of suck into where the spiraling vortex is being spawned. I added some dust particles on the ground to add an environmental effect.

Text Animation

I did a parody of late talk shows introducing myself as the host. I first made a drop in animation for "Ladies & Gentleman" phrase and added some rotation to the text. I then used a lens flare and a mask so that both "Tonight" and "Introducing" would fade in along with the flare. I also added also a wiggler expression to these two texts so they would feel a little bit more alive with movement. I finally ended with a slide in for "Lil Stevie" and made a strobe effect on the text with changing the stroke value. The "Live" text I added I applied several light effects to get the final product.

Motion Tracking

I got this idea from some of the recent HP commercials where they use frames and tracking to instantly capture stills of what is inside the frame and track it. I used a cardboard frame and marked the corners with black circles to help the tracking process. I used Mocha to get the tracking data and exported it to After Effects to produce the final video.

Lighting

I put my robot in a room and constructed it so it would look like the robot just blew through a brick wall with his arm gun. I wanted it to feel like lights were called to attention with the blown brick wall. I added some directional and spot lights to give a glow to the robot in the middle of the room.

Advanced Animation

I used expressions to get the asteroids to circle the dunker. I also added a pass to himself off the backboard as well as more explosions by using parenting.

Maya Materials

I added some more features on my robot. I equipped him with an arm gun, a shield, missile launchers on his shoulders, and a glowing core in the center of its chest. Some of the textures I included are his red yellow crossed shield and the space environment I put my robot in. I added some more detail regarding his head and other arm. I think it came out pretty interesting especially cause of the glow effect that was used.

Animation-Super Dunk

I used the image I created in Photoshop to animate and recreate a dunk in space. Of course I stepped it up by adding some explosions at the end. Most time consuming part was animating his arms and legs. I made his arms separate layers in order to function more correctly. I even added some rim bending once he makes contact with the rim.

Maya Robot

I started off thinking of the exercise we did in class to use a common shape that would represent and make up the robot. I used a square as the basis of shape to apply to my robot and modified some cubes to create certain parts of his body such as head and torso. I did gather up some of my concept work from the robot I was able to design in class for the drawing exercise. I visualized my robot as something that look subtle but still retained power. Most of my concept and design of the robot came to me as I created basic primitives consisting almost entirely of cubes. I gave the robot some interesting clamps for hands and double sided feet. Here are some the views and images of the robot i created in Maya.

Photoshop

For this Photoshop project, I used Dwight Howard's monstrous dunk he did in the slam dunk contest a couple of years ago. He earned his nickname Superman from his performance.

I took Dwight's dunk into space and added some other objects to the scene like the satellite and the space ship. I also equipped him with a flaming ball and an astronaut helmet. I had to make some adjustments in color as well and added some shading to try to make the lighting on him match the scene.

Digital Painting

I sketched out an environment of a city in two point perspective on paper and scanned it. I had started out with a basic concept and kind of just developed it as I went along.

I used Photoshop to digitally paint it. Turned out to be a pretty long and time consuming process in adding color, shadows, and highlights.

Introduction

Hello, I am Stephen Olmos. I'm from San Antonio and currently a senior Radio-Television -Film student at the University of Texas.

 

I'm really interested in digital animation, video editing, and 3D animation. I have done some other class work including a short documentary about children's improv program in Austin.  It's about the founder of a really interesting improv comedy troupe that performs for and offers classes for children.



Some of my interests include film, TV, video games, music and sports. I enjoy shows like Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Entourage, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.