Tinkering with Perception
In a drastic way of alteration: Photoshop is to photo what (in this case) Blender 3D and After Effects is to video. I guess everyone who has watched a movie featuring special effects has wondered at some point or another, how those tricks are done. It's easy to dismiss man-made technology as accepted "magic". It's there, it didn't fall from the sky, man made it, so i don't NEED to know how it works.....well I DO! :)
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This one's my favorite one, since it's a moving picture with a small narrative. Maybe a wee bit too long, but still.
All done in After Effects in what probably amounted to 80+ hours of work,...aaaaa lot of rotoscoping for the light saber and blaster shoots. Sound effects, particularly for the light sabers movement were quite fun to compile.
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Here is what Saturn would look like, if it only were as far as the moon. My little sister wasn't too sure whether this was real or not. Probably the greatest compliment you can get in this domain. This one's a little bit more analog than i care to admit:
Placing Saturn in the morning sky was still done with motion-tracking the moon, venus and another star. Barely worked with 1080p/FullHD/2K recording and would have been easier in 4K definitely. However, i guess at this point building a 3D-Scene would provide even better results and more opportunities to place things in the sky.
This was done in After Effects. Saturn imagery is actually from a well placed screenshot from the amazing SpaceEngine simulation with slight tweaks in Photoshop.
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As a student it's harder to get to far places. Looking at my sister, the travel-nut, who by now has visited Dubai multiple times, i wanted to figure out what it would look like to have the Burj Kalifa in my neighborhood.
The most important aspect here is the already very advantageous photo of the Burj Kalifa, where the lighting conditions already matched my scene perfectly. All I needed to to was to motion-track the horizon in my footage, knock out the background form the Kalifa-photograph and put everything together.
Preparation of the Kalifa's photograph was done in Photoshop and bringing everything together was accomplished in After Effects.
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This one's an inside-joke about a friend of mine who made a big fuss about the latest Harry Potter book. So i decided to try out a new technique and mook her a little bit by superimposing her head onto the book's cover.
The tricky thing here was the camera movement, which needed to be tracked (match moving), the focus jerking of the camera, which needed to be replicated and granted, could still use slight improvement and the general color correction of the superimposed footage.
Color correction and general preparation of the superimposed footage was done in Photoshop, tracking/matchmoving and matching the focus-jerking was done in Blender 3D.
This one's actually my very first render. I used 3Ds Max from Autodesk for handling the scene and Vray to render out and export the image. The model of the cup is a freebie from the internet.
The backplate (photograph) is projection-mapped (projected) onto two planes (countertop and wall) and the scene is lit with a plane out of view set up as an emission source with the same color temperature as the original light.
If you would place something over the sink in this scene, it would cast shadows mid-air and level with the rest of the countertop. Finally the reflections on the cup are from a simple single-bracketed 360° equirectangular photograph.
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Blender 3D also offers all sorts of physics simulations. One of them, and probably an easy one to start off with, is the rigid body simulation. Here a played around with a few thousand bricks.
An interesting twist here is the fact that i used the power of the internet to render everything out and not my own machine by using a render farm (sheep-it) overnight.