Time Freeze FX Shot
New short film. Well… not really. More like a short clip, but whatever. Short film sounds better.
Joshua and I went for it yesterday. This is really our first live-action short in a while, so it was exciting the get back into a different workflow. Away with animation!
The film was shot on my iPhone 4, which is a cool experience in and of itself. We’re hoping to be getting the Canon T2i soon, though. It will be a huge step-up for the both of us. Using more of an industry-standard device will be neat.
For the muzzle flash, Joshua created the image on top of alpha and I tracked it to the barrel in After Effects. I also added a lens flare as well in order to brighten it up a bit. The smoke particles were simply a solid with fractal noise applied. I set the transfer mode to “screen.” Originally, I was going to leave it as that alone, but Joshua gave me the idea to use a grain filter to give it more of a “gritty” feel rather than a fluffy look. I think in the end it really paid off to sell the shot.
One more effect that you may or may not notice when looking at it first glance is the “frosty breath” shot near the beginning. This was simple. I added a solid with Particle Playground, tweaked the velocity, gravity, etc., bumped up the particle size to 3.5, then added a fast blur. After that, I tracked the layer to the footage below.
All of the editing was done in Final Cut, and Joshua composed the music.
Anyway, without further ado, here is the result…
Enjoy!
(Oh, and be sure to watch in 720p!)
-Caleb
