Creating the OMG News Broadcast

The OMG News at 8 scene was one of the most challenging scenes to put together, mainly because it was entirely created from scratch. Only it the last step involved real footage, when I inserted it into the TV.

First the basic elements of the studio in Photoshop: the top and bottom borders, as well as the inset picture placeholder for the story picture. These were just basic geometric shapes with gradient and pattern overlays, and strokes.



Next was Glinda's desk. Again, another basic shape (1), this time with a wood pattern overlay (2). The stroke on the top (3) emphasized the edge of the desk, and the gradient overlay (4) provided the lighting effect.

The background was a composite of two photographs of Spokane's Riverfront park, kindly provided by Shanti Perez. Adding the text for Glinda McGravy and the inset completed the static elements.

Next, it was over to After Effects to add Glinda's animation. Since she didn't move much, this was a simple masking and keying step.

However, just dropping her into the scene made her hands appear behind the desk. To overcome that, I duplicated the animation, placed it above the desk layer, and then masked out everything except her hands. This was a frame by frame procedure so it was fairly time consuming.

Glinda's minifigure was pretty boring. I didn't have time to physically customize it, so I opted to CGI her jacket and shirt. I used a picture of Katie Couric for inspiration because, let's face it, you can't get much better than that. Using CGI instead of a physical customized Lego torso meant that I had to motion track the shirt and jacket image to Glinda's movement. Luckily, the movement was minimal. I certainly won't try that for an action sequence.

To make the composition even more convincing, I added shadows for Glinda's hands on the desk. I created a solid black layer and then copied the masks I'd use to get the hands to appear in front of the desk. I finished them off by offsetting them down and to the right, adding a Fast Blur, and reducing the opacity.

That completed Glinda's comp, but I still had to get her onto the TV screen.

A simple Corner Pin effect took care of that, but it was missing something. It looked too flat.

I added a little noise to simulate the same graininess of the surrounding real-life footage. Lastly, I added a lighting effect to replicate the lighting in the actual room. This provided a more realistic light cast across the TV screen.

New Hardware

I'd been holding off for a while, but I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a new computer: an HP dv8t. It's a pretty souped up beast and a hefty sized "laptop" at that, but I hope this will last a while. It's super fast and got a ton of memory, as well as having a full 1920x1080 screen—which is superb for video editing.

With all the progress I'd made on the City KREW project, I was really noticing the limitations of my previous laptop (HP dv5237cl). It had served me well for three years, but with the compositing and editing in full HD, it really wasn't up to the task. For example, in After Effects it would take up to 60 seconds to display an updated frame of the comp in full resolution at 25% zoom. The comp consisted of the background AVCHD video with a Cartoon effect applied and the stop motion comp on top with a mask, Keylight effect and Brightness/Contrast effect.

The new machine renders it in 3 seconds at 50% zoom. Sweet! I know that the biggest advantage will be when I come down to rendering out the finished comps for editing. It'll probably save me days!

Piecing it all Together

After a couple of months of sickness, I'm finally making significant progress towards completing the first episode of City KREW. About 75% of the animations are complete and 25% of the final compositions are complete, visually at least.

Compositing the scenes can be quite tricky, so here's a run down of how I'm tackling it. The Lego stop motion animations will be superimposed over real life backgrounds. The first step was to record the backgrounds, then I need to set up the stop motion shot to match the scale and perspective as closely as possible. Depending on the shot, this can be very difficult. The screenshots below show a relatively simple shot.

The real life background looks fine on its own, but when I think about having characters in the foreground, the depth of field is too great.

Luckily this is a simple fix. I simply copied the background and created a feathered mask that shows the trees that would appear behind the characters. Adding a Fast Blur gives the desired effect.

Next comes the stop motion. Using the real life background, I set up a grid on the computer that matches the camera's viewfinder grid. This allows me to match the position and scale I need for the stop motion to fit into the live background. Shooting against a green screen allows me to quickly extract the characters using a key and insert them into the background.

Unfortunately, it's not a completely smooth process. Since the characters are walking on the baseplate, the studs create enough  reflection and variation in colour that the key cannot effectively remove them. This means manually masking them out of every frame which is very tedious and time-consuming. Fortunately, because the Lego figures have all straight edges, the masks do not need to be complex. I would not want to be doing this with real actors!

Once the key is applied, the final shot looks like this. There are a few other adjustments I make depending on the background. For this, the contrast is reduced and the brightness increased for the Lego characters to try and match the lighting of the woods.

After doing about twelve of these scenes, I've really perfected my technique. Once the other animations are complete, I think I will be able to blow through the comps. When they are complete, all that remains is adding the voiceovers and other audio.

Back on Track

After a couple of weeks of illness in the family and a couple of weeks missing the motivation to get creative, I finally found the impetus to make some significant progress.

It took a little bit of trial and error, but I've finally got my system down. First, load the background up onto the computer with a 3 x 3 grid overlay on top. This mimics the grid on the camera screen and has been essential to get the scale and perspective correct on the animations. Then, set up the beginning and end of the shot to ensure the flow is correct. Lastly, get animating!

I'd originally planned to shoot at 18 or 24 frames per second, but after watching a behind-the-scenes of Wallace and Gromit, I saw they were only shooting 12 fps. If it's good enough for those Oscar winners, it's good enough for me. I'm capturing at full HD resolution (1920x1080) and after completing each scene, I run a batch process on them to reduce them to 1/4 size. This allows me to quickly generate "rushes" where I can scrutinize the animation and that I can check against the backgrounds.

After about 6 hours of work, I completed about 700 frames of animation. That's about 1/7th of the entire episode, but there;s much more work involved than just the animation. I've still got to do the keying, mouth movements, final compositing, and audio syncing. Now that I'm in the flow of it, I'm hopeful to move things forward at a good rate.

The primitive animation studio: Green screen attached to a mic stand, two table lamps, a Lego base plate, and the camera.

Never Underestimate Your Kids' Creativity

Many of the character names in City KREW were invented by my son, Kieran, in a moment of creativity. As I've been thinking about storylines, I've used bedtime as a forum for developing those ideas. He's always got questions and ideas about what happens. And while he was playing today he offered another gem for the prime location of a future episode. I won't reveal more, as it will spoil the surprise.

City KREW Episode 001, Progress Report

Halfway through September, I expected to have shot all the backgrounds shot and be wrapping up the voice overs. I'd hoped to finish Episode 001 by the end of the month. Unfortunately, things are far behind schedule.

With the family sick all week, I've made no progress at all. The loss of the original equipment I'd planned to use, forced a rethink on that front. That actually worked out in my favour as I used that and my birthday as an excuse to invest in a new HD camera. Ordering that and waiting for shipping also set back the schedule, but now I'm very pleased to have a brand new Canon HG20. And for the deal B&H Photo was offering, I got myself a slick new mic and wide angle lens as well, all for less price than Best Buy's price for the camera.

I've had the camera for most of the week, but with the family sick and a hectic week at work (whose idea was that?), I barely had chance to use it.

Luckily, not everything has drawn to a halt. The first voice over was completed by Shanti and now Winny's lines are ready for editing. The results were excellent and motivate me to get going on mine (once I get the frog out of my throat). If the weather cooperates this weekend, I'll be shooting the backgrounds.

Here's hoping next week is a productive one...

Customizing Lego Mini-figures

I've been doing a lot of reading about customizing Lego mini-figures to learn how best to create the KREW. Their uniforms and logo are designed, but I want to ensure it doesn't look too amateur.

My first attempts were to dismantle the mini-figs tools (that's what model builders call the arms, legs and body) and spray paint them. It seemed like a good idea and looked good, until I tried to reassemble them. Some paint got on the joints and made it difficult to pop in the arms or legs. I had to scrape away the excess, and then they were still a tight fit. I could imagine this causing a lot of trouble during the animation process.

The next challenge is how to get the uniform customizations on the Lego pieces. There are many options such as hand painting, stickers, or transfers. There are lots of helpful tutorials out there and it seemed like stickers were the way to go. After printing a few tests, I was not confident it was going to work. The clear labels I had did not pick up the colours vividly enough and would not show up over the dark background.

This called for a rethink... or more like a uniform redesign. So last night I completely changed the design to use stock Lego colours. There would be no need for spray painting and instead of stickers, I'll try water-slide transfers. With the help of the Lego Digital Designer and some creative Photoshopping, I mocked up the designs below. Now I just have to buy the parts.