Entry for the Midnight Riders Video Contest

[d_stilgar]

Hey guys, I've been working pretty hard on this and think I have a good first cut. A lot of post production still needs to be done. For now, let me know if the storyline is clear. Watch the video and try to tell me what you think the storyline is based on it. There are some flashbacks, and I need a good way to differentiate between flashback and present time. I'm thinking of reducing the saturation? Some kind of transition? I'm up for any kind of input right now. Thanks guys.

fpKHEmEI9AY

If you haven't looked at my thread about this contest (http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?t=24349), you could or couldn't. I explain a concept plot, although it's changed since then.

[BuzzKillington]

.22 with a 12ga belt. :P

Glad to see you got my boot bands. :D

[d_stilgar]

I know about the ammo, but we're under some sort of assumption that he finds guns lying arranged on tables like the other survivors do.

[BuzzKillington]

Ya I thought of that a little after. Makes sense.

[OvRiDe]

For the flashbacks maybe do a color correction with more of a sepia type tone.. not necessarily as strong. De saturating would probably work to, but I think you could get a more unique look with a color correction. Also maybe add a vignette around it.

My only other critique is the camera work. I totally under stand that you are working on a budget but there are several scenes that are pretty shaky. In some cases it really adds to the look but in others it kind of detracts. You may be able to fix some of it using camera tracking in your editing program. Of course the other options would be a steady cam, camera dolly, and tripod, but obviously those are not in the budget.

One suggestion.. at 4:48 where he is turning and the infection is taking hold .. when you go back and forth to the sun .. having the sun shots blur and focus might give a cool effect that things are happening. Also a shot zooming in on the picture and it blurring a bit and then just as it goes into focus have a drop of blood hit it.. then when you cut back to the face you see the first blood tears streaming down his face. Then go back to the first person view and add some more blurring and focusing, I think it will really sell what he is going through visually.

I think your story and concept are top notch, and I got my fingers crossed for you!

[d_stilgar]

Well, all the filming is done. I rented a camera to do it. Even if I did have the camera still, I'm not sure I want to put in any more hours into filming, and it took like a whole day to get enough decent stuff.

I own a tripod and we were using it for a while, but when I put the clips in the computer and started watching them they were horribly boring. I really like the shaky camera work. It's all my wife's doing. Whenever I did anything it was too steady. All her stuff is way better than mine.

I think I'm going to go with a blue tint for the flashbacks. It's pretty subtle, and imperfect right now, but I tried to have the present time shots line up with the music while the flashbacks change whenever I felt it best. I may try something like a blur or frost around the frame too, but it has to be really subtle. I don't want to insult the smart people by putting up big signs and arrows that say "This is the flashback!"

I'm also doing some corrections so it looks more like dusk/night/dawn in certain scenes. I'm not really great at the effect and I think I'll end up going into after effects and editing the clips to make it look better.

Also, I'm using this effect (http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/eye_replacement/) for my eyes at the end. I have one eye almost done completely.

Oh, one more thing. I know the sun is a little weird right now. What I'm trying to do is show the fallen survivor's viewpoint. At some point when I figure it out I'm going to have an overlay going in and out that looks like the infected view in the games. You can see what I'm trying to go for here (http://left4dead411.com/news/2008/09/l4d-infected-footage/). If anyone has a way of extracting this from the game that would be awesome. I'd appreciate it so much and give you some major +Rep.

[OvRiDe]

I totally understand where you are coming from, and in some places the hand held looks great, there were just a few places where personally I thought a more steady camera would help bring focus visually.

As for the "infected" POV I am not sure exactly which part of the look you wanting to extract. I did this quick example to see if I understand

c13T12IiK_E

or are you referring to the actual HUD? or the outlines around the characters?

[d_stilgar]

That's pretty much exactly what I meant. The yellow with black haze or fuzz or anything that looks enough like the in game infected view that most people would get it.

[OvRiDe]

Sorry it took so long to reply.. its been a long day at the office.

Ok... I did this in After Effects and I will try and do my best to explain my process.

After I imported the footage into After Effects I created a new black solid.
and with the new black solid on top of my footage I used the ellipse tool which created a elliptical mask in the middle of the screen, that covered most of the footage. Then I expanded the the Mask settings in the timeline and Checked the Inverted box, then I set the Mask Feather to about 220px, the Mask Opacity to 91%, and for me the Mask expansion to 16px. (Remember I am only working with the 360p footage so when you go to do the 1080p footage these numbers wont translate well) So now I have my vignette around the footage.

Next up I created an Adjustment layer and placed it between my footage and the black solid. I added 2 effects to it.. First up was Effect>Color Correction>Hue/Satuation. I checked the Colorize box. My Colorize Hue was 8x +33.0. Colorize Saturation was set to 83 and Colorize Lightness was -17. Then I added a Curves Adjustment (Effects>Color Correction>Curves) to punch up the contrast a bit. My curve looked like...

http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/ovride/images/misc/curve.JPG

It should be pretty close at this point. I went one step more and added a JPG of a grungy texture I had. I placed this at the top of my timeline, and then set the Blending options to Overlay.

I used keyframes and the Adjustment layer's opacity to give it a sense that the infection is fading in and out until the end where the opacity is then at 100%.

This should give you a pretty good starting point, but I highly encourage you to explore and experiment with the settings to get the look that you like best.

Hope this helps, and let me know if you have any questions.

[d_stilgar]

I'll get on it later today. I think what I'll do is make one clip 100% zombie vision, put that over the normal clip in premier, and then adjust the opacity with keyframes there so that the zombie vision is fading in and out over the regular version.

I need to get a grungy texture like that though. It'll help a lot.

[d_stilgar]

Thanks for the texture! I'll post results as soon as I finish these darn zombie eyes. It's taken like . . . 6+ hours but I finally have one eye looking good enough for me. Well, now that I look at it again I think there'll be another three hours of tweaking or so. Oh well. I'm going to get the other eye to this point before I tweak any further.

I'll post zombie vision results as soon as I get this to a tolerable place.

[d_stilgar]

Oh man, I know this is a triple post, but it's my own thread and I'm so pumped. This second eye is going so much faster than the first. It's awesome the stuff you learn.

[OvRiDe]

Good to hear!! Looking forward to seeing your results!

[d_stilgar]

Alright, the eyes are done for now. If I find time to refine them more (when everything else is done) I might, but I doubt it. They are good enough for me for a contest where there's a $200 guitar and a mystery prize from valve as the prize.

[d_stilgar]

And 10 minutes later I'm done with zombie vision. That was a lot easier than zombie eyes. Thanks again!

[d_stilgar]

Another update. I'm not sure if people are bored by this. If anyone is getting anything out of this then let me know.

There are three four edits I need to make to the stock footage. First is a flashback signature, which I decided to make by adding a blue layer. It's not sophisticated, but it'll work I hope.

The second is a sort of twilight edit to indicate the early morning or late evening. Again, simple effect I can apply to many clips.

The third is a mashup of the twilight and flashback, which is just adding the effects of both.

The last is a dark night look for when I'm supposed to be up late not sleeping and looking up at the stars.

I then added the necessary clips to each of the lists and then made the compositions in After Effects. I'm rendering all of the flashback clips now. Then I'll do the twilight flashback and then twilight. Then I'll remove all that junk and just do the dark night clips.

I now realize why someone might want more than 8 gigs of ram. I have 8, and 6+ are being used right now to render. 1080p stuff kills the speed of the program. It mostly has to do with the fact that small lossless video files are 4+Gb for a 24 second clip. I'm limited by the hard drive access speed, but having tons of ram would help.

EDIT: lossless was crazy big. No wonder my computer is slowing down so much. I created my own render profile at 16mb/s. That's pretty much where my stock stuff is. I really just wanted it to be that all along but I was having a hard time figuring out the render settings.

[d_stilgar]

Finally finished! Here's what I hope to be the final edit. There's been a ton of work on this. Watch it in 720p at least and let me know what you think!

zmBjvIMvhV4

[d_stilgar]

I'm surprised. It's been three days and nobody has commented on my final video. Maybe it's the quintuple post so you think nothing is going on here and just ignoring the thread.

[d_stilgar]

One week later and nobody has anything to say? I'm beginning to think this thread is an example of the great internet echo chamber.

[OvRiDe]

I think it came out great! The eye replacement at the end is perfect! I have looked at a few of the other entries, and it appears like most of them have just used game footage, or footage of other things in a montage. Yours will really stand out.

Good luck and I got my fingers crossed!

[d_stilgar]

Things are picking up. A post on the Valve forums suggests that thumbs up may play some part in their decision. If everyone here could give my final video a thumbs up that would be totally awesome!

zmBjvIMvhV4

[blueonblack]

Apologies for the delayed response here. My Internet connection and video don't play well together, but I just checked out this video at a friend's house and I love it. Your choice of music was excellent, the camera work was great. I love the tilted scenes and the effect at the end when he finally gives in as well as the focus on the words in the note he wrote. It's obvious that a lot of work went into it, and I'm with Curtis on the eyes at the end, excellent.