visual effects is the term used to describe any imagery created, altered or enhanced for media.
visual effects take place simultaneously in a controlled studio along with the primary image capture or it can be captured during post production.
The VFX producers work with cinematographers and directors to assess which scenes require green screens.
why do we use them?
VFX tools allow us to integrate live action footage and generated imagery ( digital or optics, animals or creatures).
make something fake look more realistic, blending the line between real and unreal.
avoids all the dangers, expenses, impracticalities and the time it would take to capture purely on film.
Visual effects using computer-generated imagery (CGI) has become increasingly popular and more accessible to independent filmmakers with new, affordable animation and compositing software.
visual effects takes place in post-production after primary image capture is finished.
see how Stormzy uses vfx in his music video for rainfall
three main types of visual effects:
compositing & Green screen
Digital compositing joining multiple images into a single image. Chroma keying of Green/ Blue screens behind a subject is replaced with a desired background.
CGI
Computer Generated Imagery made within computers and other types of VFX to enhance/combine live action footage. A key example is CG animation used by Pixar.
motion capture
Similar to the old technique of rotoscoping, VFX artists today can use live action reference to create more realistic CGI. This is known as motion capture or mocap.
Interview with The Creators Project & Campbell Logan
"Can you talk a bit about the process and techniques behind “Orion Beach”?"
The Creators Project:
"So to be clear, you filmed the entire video with real people and then animated over it?"
The Creators Project:
"I wanted to do character animation, and I wanted to do it in a way that was a classical style of animation, which is live-action rotoscope. In other words, this is filming a live performance and animating over that. It's a bit like motion capture, except I'm not actually inputting any data from actors' performances. From there, I modeled characters and created environments. This is after I cut all of the action for the music video together from live action footage. I put a good six months into it, and that was it."
Campbell Logan:
"Yeah, exactly."
Campbell Logan:
Interview with Vimeo video school & Campbell Logan
"How did this project come about?"
Vimeo Video School:
How did you do the animation? What equipment, techniques, and programs did you use?
Vimeo Video School:
"Pardon my ignorance, but I always thought that rotoscoping involved hand-tracing/drawing over video footage, frame by frame. How does rotoscoping work with computer graphics (CG)? Are you still working frame by frame?"
Vimeo Video School:
Zach Robinson of D/A/D is a very old friend of mine. At a party one time, he mentioned he was in the middle of mastering a new album, and I said I would love to do a video. I listened to the whole album, meditated on it, and picked out my favorite track, which was “Orion Beach.” After I sat with it, listened to it too many times, and gradually this cloudy picture came together in my head of abstract humanoids going on an extremely chill jet-ski adventure on another planet.
Campbell Logan:
For this project, pretty much all I used was a camera, tripod, five of my friends, a trampoline, my laptop, Final Cut Pro, Maya, and Realflow. I wanted to do some really elaborate character animation for this film, but didn’t have access to crazy motion capture equipment, so I came up with the idea of shooting the whole video in live-action and essentially rotoscoping it, but in a modern way. I’ve actually just uploaded the animatic/motion capture template I shot and edited together: I’m sure it’s apparent that we had a lot of fun on this shoot! It was a good sign when this video made people laugh before any of the animation was done.
Campbell Logan:
So rotoscoping basically means I shot live performances of actors and did animation based on their movement. Hand-drawn animations might still be done with this technique, but it’s pretty archaic now. These days motion capture or move matching is the industry standard, which is a process where they record movement information with a bunch of tracking points and relay it to a CG animation.
Campbell Logan:
For this project I did something a little weird. I used this
older technique with newer technology. The cool thing about
CG animation is that you don’t need to do this frame by frame. In computer animation programs like Maya, you can set key frames. For example, I can take a live action shot that is 10 frames, let’s say, of an arm moving up to down. On frame one, the arm is up and on frame 10, it is down. In programs like Maya, you can set the first keyframe of the arm to be up, then set another, 10 frames later, to have the arm down. After doing this the computer creates frames in between these frames, which makes the process faster. Motion capture is even faster than this process, but it's also more expensive.
After the live action shoot and edit was done, I separated each shot and/or scene and created Maya scenes based on those. I imported my live action footage into a scene with all of the assets and was able to set the keyframes needed based on the movement.Since the video had already been edited, I didn’t waste any frames. And after I finished all of the animation, I added the environments, textures, and special fluid elements.
![Major Lazer – Light it Up (feat. Nyla & Fuse ODG) (Remix) [Official 4K Music Video]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/r2LpOUwca94/maxresdefault.jpg)
