Compositing reel

Drew Perttula

October 2001 Demo Reel Notes

DivX demo reel (26MB) available, though you'll have to ask me to post a link to the current location, since it has moved around.

My tools are After Effects and Photoshop by Adobe; Rayz by Silicon Grail; Blender by NaN; POV-Ray, Gimp, and various scripting languages.

00:09s	God with flamethrower
00:15s	The interactive effects are an animated color-correction and a noise distortion field near the center of the image-- both Rayz effects.
00:17s	Original particle system written in Perl. 50 particles emit from a moving source position and direction. Particles accelerate upward and are recycled after they reach a certain distance. Rendered as spheres with POV-Ray.
00:18s	Final POV-Ray render using a halo effect with turbulence inside each sphere. Additional glow added later with Rayz.
00:28s	Church explosion
00:31s	Pew model by Harlan Hile using Blender. I exported the Blender object to POV-Ray for rendering.
00:36s	Pew animation written in POV-Ray's own scripting language. Pews and floor rendered in POV-Ray. Z-buffer rendered as a separate pass with a gradient texture on all objects.
00:40s	Explosion is a POV-Ray sphere with a turbulent halo interior. I animated the threshold between opaque orange and transparent to increase the volume of the explosion over time. I used Rayz to mask the explosion to an animated depth using the pew element Z-buffer.
00:43s	Traveling light pass from POV-Ray. Glow enhanced with Rayz.
00:49s	Dust element pulled from video shot at a ranch in Martinez; stabilized with Rayz. I replicated the usable dust area and masked it with another animated depth matte.
00:55s	To add authentic camera shake, I actually shook a real camera and tracked the result with Rayz. Then I applied the shake to the church shot (in the same slow motion as the rest of the shot).
01:06s	Amphitheater
01:10s	I have two friends who I can convince to stand outside the Sierra Spring Water building in Emeryville in various outfits. I'm the one in black at the end.
01:25s	Rayz contains Ultimatte, which I used on the 12 "cels" to create about 3000 frames of people.
01:27s	A custom crowd placer Perl script reads a bitmap of person locations (shown here). The script drives the Gimp to scale and place the individual-person frames at the right locations. Scaling is simply a function of y-position. Each person instance has its own counter and framerate.
01:29s	The placer script placed people on a large panorama, but for efficiency, it didn't include people very far outside of the current field of view. The actual panning and zooming was done with Rayz.
01:38s	Tower climb Simple composite done with After Effects. The foreground element had to be tracked to undo a camera move.
01:50s	Neptune - ship flyby A multi-layer effect done with POV-Ray (for the 3D work) and After Effects (for the compositing). The dog was composited over the cockpit, whose front window was replaced with a moving starfield. That result was mapped onto a surface inside the ship's window.
01:50s	Neptune - lever pull After Effects combines a background miniature; a 3D lever created in POV-Ray; and a roto'd dog element. I adjusted the timing of the lever pull to match the dog's movement.
01:55s	Neptune - ship hit Some simple After Effects lightning and camera shake effects, plus a roto'd dog animated over the scene.
2:05s	Real-time foreground over time-lapse scene The background uses a custom video capture program I wrote that accumulates frames and saves a motion-blurred, time-lapse animation directly. The foreground (me) was difference-matted from its background using Rayz and placed over the time-lapse animation.