I am having to to work within several limitations at the moment, you will see that there that there no full figure shots, as I can’t get the camera far enough away, also other than the fill lights for the green screen, I don’t have any stage lights, so I am currently faking it in Sony vegas by using colour filters and lighting effects, this is taking a long time as there is a fine line to tread beyond which things start to look fake, and some days you can get too close to it to make a proper judgement.
The work flow is that I shoot the live stuff first, chroma key out the background, import a reference frame into Blender which I then use to line up the stage. I then render out five or six stills of each camera angle, each with a different set of lights on, which I save as images, which I then import into Sony Vegas, I edit the stills so that the lights change to the music, then I composite the live action on top, and finally, I add the colour filters, these are extremely good, and Vegas allows you to work very much on the fly, in a way that you can’t in blender. (Vegas is of course only a video editor, so it isn’t trying to do a lot of the things that blender does).
I’ve decided that I’ll put up a piece of the video on the understanding that it is sill a wip and I will certainly change and redo some of it.
Thanks for the overview on the workflow. It really is working great…even in WIP stage… It’s great to get live action involved in this (plus good music too by the way. I guess my only comment after watching the video is it almost too strobe like in many parts… I know you mentioned your trying to time the lights to the music, but I wonder if less might be more at certain times.
I would experiment with maybe making the fast light changes only at very critical parts of the song, and more traditional concert lighting changes in other areas. Just a thought.
But this is so cool what your trying to do here. I hope others will check it out.
I would experiment with maybe making the fast light changes only at very critical parts of the song, and more traditional concert lighting changes in other areas. Just a thought.
I get carried away by my enthusiasm sometimes. Cathy said much the same. I must admit less frenetic lighting would make the job a lot easier.:o
Latest update. This is a shot taken via virtual camera from the audience position. The idea is that it I will only use the best parts, edited with other camera angles and also with what is happening on the screen, (which is actually what this little movie is really about). There are cases of disappearing musicians, and some bits are better than others, but I will be cherry picking what works, so that does not bother me. In the end the editing will be the crucial part.
This is really coming along , the editing will be fun but challenging. Do you have a way to do multiple audience angles, or are you just locked into this one. Curious… what’s the reason for only showing them from the waist up?
The other day I was looking at your lights and they seemed to sharp at the edges, but I went back and looked at some real concert footage, and often times the spot lights appear very sharp. But in some ways a little more feathering might be something to consider.
When are you going to integrate the drummer? … sorry about all the questions. But this is really an entertaining project.
This is really coming along , the editing will be fun but challenging. Do you have a way to do multiple audience angles, or are you just locked into this one. Curious… what’s the reason for only showing them from the waist up?
That is a technical issue I have. My living room is 10 feet by 14, so even by putting the camera in the hallway, I cannot get far enough away to get a full body shot. ( and at the moment it is impractical to do the shooting outside). What I did do was a succession of takes in which I was facing in different directions, to simulate the effect of different camera shots, but I am running out of hard drive space, (as I am shooting 1080p for quality, and saving as PNG. which is using up a lot of space. I am avoiding compression as I know that I will be rerendering a lot of this. the approach I am taking is to give me enough material that I can be choosy about what i edit, and with luck things will go by fast enough that people will not notice the lack of feet .
As far as drums go, I can play a lot of stuff, but although I programme drums well (something I enjoy). My real life drumming skills are somewhat rudimentary. Also our bands drummer (who would have been up for it), has gone AWOL after a run in with the taxman.
I would like to learn how to rig a character well enough to do it as animation but right now for me these are the voodoo arts. and for the time being I think that I will edit the drums so that you will not get the time to see whether there is a drummer playing or not. However, I only need to build the stage once, and for future projects ( which there will be, it will be a ready made resource so that I can concentrate on the things I haven’t been able to do this time). The bottom line for me is that I was looking for a way to make interesting music videos, without it costing the earth, and blender has given me the tools I need, so this will not be the only time I do this. (I hope).
I think if I had a choice of drummer, I would use this guy.
An update in which I am mixing the “Band Footage” with the other video that I am working on to produce a finished music video, |The second half (yet to be seen still has a lot to do), but as far as this goes, I am now pretty happy with it, and will probably only make minor changes.
WOW… friggen excellent! The whole piece really came out wonderful… now you really have me curious on how you did the environment that the spaceship was flying over while it was still on earth.
Something I was thinking about while watching is maybe you can fake the drummer on a few scenes by simply animating a hit on the symbols during one or 2 of the scenes… just a thought
But a spectacular job on mixing all of this., the inside of the spaceship was cool and I’m sure it took a lot of time to model that.
WOW… friggen excellent! The whole piece really came out wonderful… now you really have me curious on how you did the environment that the spaceship was flying over while it was still on earth.
Something I was thinking about while watching is maybe you can fake the drummer on a few scenes by simply animating a hit on the symbols during one or 2 of the scenes… just a thought
The section with the spacecraft at the beginning was done over a period of months and is in a way a history of my learning to use the programme. The ship itself is almost one of the first things I ever built, (although it has been regularly updated as my knowledge has increased). I started to use Blender seriously about two and a half years ago, and the oldest shot here (one where it blasts off into orbit from the ground view) is about 18 months old. the opening shot of the city was done using blender internal, and the city was all mesh modelling as I had not yet got my head round the idea of using the particle system to create instances, so that took a long time to build. And was very unwieldy. Later on, some of the landscape were done using cycles, (I bought a decent Nvidia card to do that), at the time however it was still at an early stage of development, the render times were very long and I had a fair bit of trouble with noise, so after a while I switched back to using internal. I learned a few useful tricks along the way however, such a using both engines simultaneously (especially using BI mist settings for atmospheric haze) and combining BI and cycles in the compositor. I keep an eye on developements in cycles, and use it for non animation stuff, and will probably use it more once volumetrics has been added.
The mountains are created using the ant landscape generator plugin, (Which is excellent), and nearly all the texturing is mine, as that is an area that I am particularly interested in, though generally I use photoshop for texture creation, as I have long experience of using that programme. on the the modelling side there is no third party models, although I have on occasion used stuff appended from other projects of mine to save time.
As far as the drummer goes It might be that I do as you suggest, and I might do a couple of short sequences with animated lights. But the render times on the stage are long, so its on the to do list if I get the time. In the longer term I built the stage for more general use (ie. for future music videos), and I have plans to learn character animation by building a robot drummer. This is as an in joke on one of the rock forums I frequent, where they complain that I tend to progamme my drums. The truth is that I like drum programming, and also if I tried recording a real drummer in my bedroom where I do my recording, I would probably get complaints from the neighbours.:yes:
There is more to come, the scifi part already runs all the way through, but there are several scenes that I could do much better, so I am going to attempt to modify them for the better. There is also some extra band footage to do, as I only finished recording the last parts of the track a couple of days ago. I am afraid I can’t pretend to play along to something I haven’t finished writing yet!:o
Thanks for the compliment,I think that I remember that from the early 90’s. I have to say though that a more conscious influence might be the old German band Tangerine Dream, who were at their best in my formative teenage years.
There is a logical reason for this shot (I promise). And what it has to do with a music video will become clear, but I got quite excited about the result, so I had to share it!
Unfortunately my system drive, an ocz vertex3 ssd has packed up, and everything has temporarily ground to a halt. apparently I am not unique in having this problem. Fortunately my data is on other drives, and backed up so this is an annoyance not a disaster. It will be a little while though before I am up and running again.:no:
OH… thank goodness you had most of it backed up… let that be a lesson to everyone… when was the last time YOU backed up your crucial data.
I used to have a raid 5 system that was awesome… It saved my skin more than once. I miss it on my computer now. Hope you can get back up and running soon.
I’m back, and everything is working again. I am going to try and finish this by Dec 6th which is the deadline for a short film competition.
Here are some shots, these are works in progress and may not be the final versions.
Hey… good to see you back, the screen shots look great, I’m kind of trying to figure out the background in the 3rd image you posted.
Obviously someone is looking out from the stage at maybe an outdoor festival … but the greenish background has me a little perplexed. but I’m sure it will all come together and become more obvious.
Thats a tight deadline … wish you well on getting it wrapped up.
