I completed another one! This one was a lot of fun to make. The topic was difficult, but I managed to come up with a story on the second day.

We started to film on the first Saturday but I had way too much footage for the 3 minutes, so what else could I do but... start all over again with a new story.

Please feel free to let loose with comments of any flavor, I am always looking for ways to improve. Analyzing criticism is a good way to do it.

I hope you enjoy it.

Hey Bruce, that was funny, interesting video. It looks like all but the beginning and end was done with chroma key, I almost didn't notice at first. Some cool effects. I liked how the scientist was just cut off, haha, and how the beer drinker just doesn't care.

It may have been better if the beer drinker shrugged his shoulders after watching so it makes it seems like he doesn't care even more. Beer is more important for him, lol.

I thought some of the overlays to make the video like a camera were a bit too strong and a little distracting. For the scientist the lines could be less opaque, for the reporter, a little less digitalized.

As added effect you could have sprayed water droplets on the weatherman's face and have him wipe them off like he is super stressed.

It was a cool video Bruce.

Justin

Man that looked like a lot of work. Turned out really good. How did you do the Chroma Key thing? The only time I tried it, it didn't look anywhere near as good as that. I liked the weather guy, cracked me up. great job and kudo's for all the graphics. you'll have to give us some tips on how you did all of that.

Beer is more important for him For me too. :D

What a cool concept. Imagine, a meteorologist not knowing what the weather effects will be of a split sun. I have to ask, are you or did you get a special deal on a car for that plug? Nicely done Bruce.

Big Tex, you were great! Pretty funny doing that extreme close up. :)

What a tongue-in-cheek look at how news people would handle a catastrophe like that. The weatherman blabbering on at top speed about how he hasn't got a clue, the expert getting cut off--pretty wry, Bruce...

I'm with the others here--really impressed with your chromakeying and your graphics. The only comment of a different flavor I would make agrees with Justin's assessment and suggestion concerning the final shot. (I hate trying to come up with good endings--makes me cut SNL a lot of slack for their lame endings on skits over the years!)

Thanks for going to all the work; it was well worth it.

Bruce, this one really had me chuckling. Love the studio reporter's reaction to the other reporter flaming up. As other have mentioned, great job on the keying. What kind of setup did you use for the greenscreen work? It's never easy to pull good keys off DV. Also the graphics seem like a lot of work. You pulled it off nicely within the short time frame.

I must say, Day 2 was a little too weird for me. Count me in as one of the old folks. (I'm only 29, but I definitely feel that generation gap). The Day 3 entries are working for me a lot more.

I got that kind of 1960s Japanese Monster movie feel. Good special effects and chroma key. You could get some serious work at your local news station! (Forgive me if you already do that! HAHAHAH!) I found the lack of panic to be amusing especially since despite the catastrophic events, the weatherman acted just like… well… the Weatherman! Oh and hey, that guy at the end did the right thing! I would have cracked a beer too! I laughed (even at that poor field reporter! Am I disgraceful, or what?). Thank you!

That was a sweet news setup. I've dabbled in Chroma Keying but nowhere near as good as this. The weather forecast part cracked me up. Its like "The sun split in half....now for the weather" Favorite movie of day 3 for me.

Thanks for all the comments so far.

This was kind of challenging technically, there were a lot of items that needed some individual attention, obviously the chroma key was a big one.

The secret for the chroma key was the Green screen.

My brother (Greg, the beer drinker/tv watcher) and I have a martial arts school and we decided to put a green screen on one of the walls. So, we went to the local hardware store, found a nice color of green and painted, and painted, and painted (actually he painted it). This was done about a month ago.

We didn't really have much of a chance to test it, except for maybe one or two quick shots. The trick was lighting and shadows. The formula was: keep the actor far enough away from the wall to prevent any shadows from being cast where the camera would see them, and put enough of a consistent lighting on the wall. We used our 3 omni's to light the wall (we chose 500W instead of the 1000W because we got too much of a shine of the 1000W).

This gave us some nice footage (I can post a few clips if anyone is interested in the raw green screen footage).

The next step was to add chroma blur first and then chroma key (in Vegas), This was really trial and error. Kudos to Greg for the results. A region of green from the source was selected for the source, then tweaking the chroma blur settings. Finally we added a bit of unsharpen mask to tidy up the image. I can provide more details if anyone would like specifics on this.

That was it.

Some of the other effects were pretty difficult since we don't really do this for a living. We made the news set, news letters, fire (and others) in Lightwave 3d and the sun split scenes in Vue 5 (the scene during the titles took nearly 5 days to render). We wanted to add some smoke, but we were tired of working on computers.


It may have been better if the beer drinker shrugged his shoulders after watching so it makes it seems like he doesn't care even more. Beer is more important for him, lol.

I thought some of the overlays to make the video like a camera were a bit too strong and a little distracting. For the scientist the lines could be less opaque, for the reporter, a little less digitalized.

Justin, we shot the beer dringing scene on last Saturday. I did think of re-shooting the scene after our first preview, but by this time we had really enough after all of the other work. Also, I couldn't think of anything else that he could do! But the shrug was a good suggestion. I also thought that the video effects might have been too much, but this actually looks pretty good in the higher rendered version, So we just decided to stick with, especially after 20 test renders or so.

I liked the weather guy, cracked me up. ... you'll have to give us some tips on how you did all of that.
Micheal, the weather guy is another one of my brothers (Brian). He loved doing the scene, I told him he forecasts the weather like is doing a sportscast! He cracked me up. I would be glad to provide more info on the effects if you like.

Big Tex
Lorinda, thanks for the compliment. I thought that I needed some sort of transition from the watching tv scene into the news cast. I came up with the commercial idea that last Saturday Morning. We shot it on the green screen, one take (first I had to buy a 85 cent cigar), it took just a few minutes. The close up was gregs idea to hide the transition from outside the tv to inside. We actually put the video on dvd then played it on the tv.

Love the studio reporter's reaction to the other reporter flaming up.
Eric, we could never decide what was too "cheesy". Our first cut was really horrible. We had to re-shoot a couple of scenes so that it actually looked funny instead of stupid.

I got that kind of 1960s Japanese Monster movie feel. Oh and hey, that guy at the end did the right thing! I would have cracked a beer too!
Thanks Hugh, you know, beer was its own reward in this film. We certainly laughed a lot during the editing of this (and drank beer).

The weather forecast part cracked me up. Its like "The sun split in half....now for the weather"
John, my brother will be really pleased that so many people liked his forecast. He really enjoyed it.

Some extra rehearsal time may have helped with the acting here, I think, but I liked the Big Tex routine, and the weather guy was unbelievable! Make sure you tell him what a good job he did, and write more parts for that guy in the future.

Great work on the effects, I can only imagine what you had to go through for all that. Rendering is fun, no? No, I suppose it's not. Anyway, when all is said and done, I'm with TV Watcher: the Sun just split in half, what else is there to do?

Bruce,

Great parady of the news. I liked the pacing a lot. You were spot on with that. Kinda glad we didn't post on the same day really. :)

Bruce,

Great parady of the news. I liked the pacing a lot. You were spot on with that. Kinda glad we didn't post on the same day really. :)


Kris, when I saw your video, I thought "Oh, No." they are doing the same thing, fortunately you took the dateline 60 min approach. Thanks for the nice words.

extra rehearsal time...
Rendering is fun, no? No, I suppose it's not.

Robert, you know what is so funny about the "acting" part? The actors that need "more rehearsal", guess what they are: Actors! The weather guy, not an actor, Big Tex (me), definitely NOT an actor. Without my brother (the weather guy) I think this would have fallen pretty flat (I already told him about his great effort). And rendering, it is just a little bit more fun that watching paint dry (insert green screen).

Bruce,

Great green screen work. And your brothers were terrific, especially the weather guy! Is it going to get colder, hotter? I don't know!

One error distracted me, Amature video should be "Amateur video" but other than that the news set was great. I'm drinking a glass of wine as I review these, and IBM just bought our Company today, so my comments might not be completely coherent.

Did anyone else want to see a little flesh as the news reporter started to burn up? Probably just the neanderthal gene in me acting up!

Funny stuff!

Dick

Dick, you are the only person to have caught the spelling mistake. When I found it, I was ready to deliver and just couldn't put up with another render. Also, we had a power failure with vegas open and it seemed to jack up the application completely, I was afraid to mess with it!

Enjoy the wine, mine is a red.

I can't believe how ambitious you were for a week-long project! Kudos to you for pulling it off and actually making something watchable. I know if I was relying on something as finicky as DV greenscreening on a budget for most of my movie I'd be sweating bullets the whole time.

It's hard not to draw comparison between all the "news-style" shorts, I find this one particularly amusing because it's so over-the-top; the "Mars Attacks" of DVC6. I admire your gusto!

Thanks for the laughs and good luck!


-j

Somehow I have neglected to comment on this one so far. Not sure how but yep, I second pretty much everything that has been said so far.

I think the weather guy was perfect. I said the same thing the others did, he really comes off as a sportscaster. Worked well.

Nice work on the graphics. I used to do all that with virtual sets and stuff before they were really popular, like 15 years ago but the 3d packages weren't quite up to it yet. Old 3d-Studio guy myself.

Good job.

Sean

Bruce,

You are definately an ambitious guy taking on all that extra production with Lightwave, etc. I've dabbled in green screen stuff and I own and use Lightwave 3D and understand how difficult something like this would be to produce in the 10 days we had, especially since you really didn't have 10 days because of your reshoot.

I enjoyed the story very much. I thought it was a great idea.

I thought your 'scientist' shot was great, I liked the graphics being displayed on his screen.

A couple of things I noticed (I guess I'm being picky):
1. There is a noticable color/white balance shift in your 'beer drinking guy' shot from the initial shot to the reverse. I don't know what camera you used, but maybe you can't manually set the white balance. It's also quite difficult to shoot with outside light coming in AND tungsten light.

2. I thought the flames in the background with the newsreporter were moving too fast to 'sell' the shot. I think if they were slowed down a bit, it would add to the realism.

3. The 'digitizing' of the scientist and field reporter could have been toned down a bit for my taste.

4. (I'm being really picky) I don't know if Vegas has a 'spill supressor', but some of your green screen shots were suffering from green spill. It's hard as heck to get rid of sometimes, especially if you don't own the pro version of After Effects or a compositing program like that.

You did an awesome job Bruce, with the amount of time we had, I'm impressed. Keep up the great work,

Jim

James,

Thanks for all of the detailed comments. I think next time I need to have you review my stuff before posting it! :)

regarding the white balance/color shift. I didn't even notice it. This may have been due to some color corrections done differently between the two scenes. I will go back and look at this. The only readon the white balance could have been different is that the shot of the television had some sunlight through the window. But I will check it. Good observation.

Man have I had a bunch of different opinions on the fire! Some like it, some don't. You could be right on the speed though, we didn't try it slower.

For the green spill, it was really hard to get it as clean as we did, I will do a bit of research on spill supression.

I think the high-res version shows the "digitizing" a bit more cleanly, but I am not sure.

Thanks again for the great comments.

Thanks again.