Seriously, though. Recently, I learned about a very neat transition in Final Cut. Introducing… The Gradient Wipe!

(Disclaimer: Remember when I talked about cheesy transitions? A gradient wipe can be just as cheesy if you overdo it. Don’t.)

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s jump in. First of all, what is a gradient wipe? My local dictionary says nothing on the subject, so you can make up your own definition based on the explanation. Let’s play with a gradient wipe.

Add a gradient wipe between two clips just like you would any other transition. Now, for basic experimentation, find the second clip in your browser and drag it into the slot I’ve pointed out in the picture. Drag the softness slider up a bit, play the video, and you should see something pretty interesting. Here’s what I got:

Gradient Wipe from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

Pretty neat, huh? Let me explain how it works. When you added the clip to the slot, you added a matte. Final Cut uses this matte to decide which areas of the shot to transition first. Darker areas at the beginning, lighter areas last. We can use this to our advantage to make a very artsy transition.

You’re going to need Photoshop or some similar photo editing application for these next examples. Launch Photoshop and create a new image the size of your video. Make sure your foreground and background colors are black and white, then do Filter>Render>Clouds. Save that image and bring it into Final Cut.

Drop your new cloud picture into the matte slot on your gradient wipe. Play it and see what happened. Here’s mine:

Cloud Gradient Wipe from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

Let’s make this even more interesting. Remember the movie National Treasure? When Riley is explaining to Ben the security surrounding the Declaration of Independence, there’s a really neat shot of “kids on their eighth grade field trip.” The kids come in first, and then the background fades in behind them.

The filmmakers probably did a lot of motion tracking and matting and such to pull off this shot. Here’s a low-budget/lower-time way to get the same effect with a gradient wipe.

First, shoot some video of your people walking in front of something. Plan ahead more than I did and make sure they stand out against the background. The key to making this work without too much hassle is to have your subject stay still for a few seconds before they start to move.

Bring that video into Final Cut, and then export a frame of the part where your subject is standing still. Open the image in Photoshop.

Do a nice cutout job of your subject and get them on a separate layer. Get rid of the background and make it white. For the foreground, you have two options. You can either shade your subject all black to make them fade in all at once, or, as in the National Treasure effect, paint your subject in gradually lightening shades. Remember, darker fades in first.

Once you’ve saved that, bring it back into Final Cut and drop it in the matte slot. You may have to do some adjustments, but you should come out with something like this:

Complex Gradient Wipe from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

As you can see, the possibilities are nearly endless. If you come up with anything interesting, leave a comment linking to your video. I’d love to see it!

The DV Rebel’s Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap (Paperback)
by Stu Maschwitz
ISBN: 0321413644

Price: USD 31.49
85 used & new available from USD 15.74

Summary

A guide to doing things with your indie film that all other books tell you not to do. You will learn the basics of color correction, the basics of safely using guns, the basics of story, more than the basics of production value, and much more.

The Good

The DV Rebel’s Guide is very easy to read. There’s a lot here and you will likely put the book down with a plan to try almost everything in it.

Editing is introduced well, as is cinematography. I learned some new things about editing, something I tend to read books on and go, “I knew that already.”

This is the only book I’ve read that goes into production value in any depth. The entire first chapter (and the rest of the book) is devoted to this subject. Get that and story down, and you have the “killer action movie” specified on the cover.

The Bad

Occasional mild language. The section about faking a shooting is rather gory, as is the brief bit on blood. Tons of action movies I’d never seen (I likely will never see most of them) are referenced to explain effects.

I walked away from the section on squibs with plans to up the amount of objects destroyed in my next film. Guess that should be in The Good, since that sort of thing is the book’s mission.

Parts I Couldn’t Review

The book is supposed to include a DVD with bonus chapters, After Effects files, Excel spreadsheet calculators, and other stuff. I got the book from the library and they didn’t have the DVD.

Overall

As stated above, the book fulfilled its mission. I’ve been thinking about production value a lot more lately, and I’m excited about the possibilities of effects I had previously ruled out.

Your patience has been rewarded. Here, at long last, is the tower top behind the scenes video.

Behind the Scenes of the iSundae II Tower Top Scene from Phantom Moose Films on Vimeo.

You can also watch the video on YouTube.

This is the last behind the scenes article we have planned. Is there anything that you want to know about from iSundae II? Leave a comment and tell us, and we’ll see if we can accommodate you.

I should have learned my lesson, but look what crops up in iSundae 2. You guessed it. A swamp monster. This time I thought I would be smart. I started with a little model. Actually, I started with drawings, but then I made the model. He turned out pretty good. The idea was for him to be waterproof so we could portray him rising from pools of camouflaged sawdust and water. That never happened. Little Bob simply served as a prototype for Bob the Elder.

Bob needed to say lines, so I created a larger scale model of Bob’s head with a moveable jaw. I really should have given him a moveable tongue, as it would have added much more to the general effect. We mounted him on blue screen and commenced filming. All told, I probably put eight hours into the two Bobs, start to finish.

We reviewed the footage and, guess what! We promptly assigned someone with the job of making a computer-generated Bob. Sad, isn’t it? Not really. I had a fun time making him. . . (or should I say “hims” since there were two of him?)

Hopefully I’ll either learn this time and keep a monster out of the next movie, or I’ll improve my crafting skills. Which is more likely to happen remains to be seen.

Throwing Objects

At one point in iSundae II, a character tosses a small paper packet out her front door. It is extremely difficult to show the packet going anywhere if you just throw it on camera. To fix this, I fired up Final Cut Express and built a matte around a shot of the packet. This isolated the packet, which I could then animate to the exact spot that I wanted it to land.

Animating Mattes

We shot a scene on blue screen with a character pulling out a map. Unfortunately, the map had lots of blue on it, so when I went to key the scene, the map disappeared. No problem. I duplicated the video clip, moved it up a layer, and then proceeded to animate a matte around the map (try saying that ten times fast).

I have also discovered that swords and blue screen do not mix. Guess what I’m doing to get the swords back!

Screen Savers

One of our characters has a little screen that he projects his visual aids onto. In one shot, we didn’t have anything to put on the screen, so I created a little logo in Photoshop, brought that into Final Cut, and did a little animated screen saver.

As you can see, keyframe animation can produce some pretty neat effects. They can be your best friend in some difficult movie effects situations.

Things are falling together quite nicely. All of the scenes have been placed together in a rough cut. Although I haven’t found time to watch the whole thing yet, I’m sure that somebody could watch it and understand the story.

Right now, I’m doing sound effects. This has been a fun part for me, because I have to be creative and try to come up with objects that will sound like the props in the film. Yesterday I did a horn sound, using an Australian didjeridoo, played by my younger brother, who plays it much better than I do.

Rebekah and her mom have been recording the musical score for the movie. I heard some of it for the first time yesterday and I was blown away! This is quite a notch up from last year’s score.

My other brother Ben has been creating some great effects. Again, this is a notch up from our previous film.

I hope you’re getting as excited as I am!

To begin with, we shot some nice video of our villain (me!) with some space around him. Here’s a frame from that:

A humble beginning

Next, we broke out the good old blue screen, dressed up five of our seven people to be Norse guards, and shot some video. These are some resulting frames, before keying out the blue screen:

Some guards on blue screen

And a few more

Okay, we’ve got the video that we need. Time to put it together. I launched my favorite video editing software (Final Cut Express) and got to work.

I laid down the villain shot as the background, then added one layer of Norse dudes over the top. A bit of color correction plus some chroma keying, and I had this result:

Where’d those guards come from?!

Not bad, but still a bit unimpressive. Besides, one of those guards looks oddly familiar. Unless she’s got an identical twin serving in this army, I’m not mistaken in thinking that she’s in there twice. Time to cover her up.

I took another clip of blue screen guards (we did three arrangements with each actor switching costumes for each setup), mirrored it to face the other way, and placed that clip on top of the other two. Now we have two rows of guards, no duplicates (except that I’m playing the villain and a guard, but I’ve got a helmet covering my face, so you can’t really tell), and a room full of more people than we had actors. Here’s a frame from the final video:

Final effect

Mission accomplished!

So, how do you make a floating head?

We solved this by having me wear a large green box that came down to my waist and got in the way of every gesture I instinctively wanted to make. It was quite a task to try to help Ruth set up microphones when I couldn’t move my arms at all.

How does Malfhok carry stuff?

Far into the writing of iSundae, we encountered a difficulty. We had given Malfhok a Book of Knowledge, but no way to carry it. We thought of two remedies. A: We could make it float with him. B: A podium would appear in a puff of smoke whenever he needed the book.

We settled on option A, as it was much easier.

Floating up and down.

The script called for Malfhok to float up or down in a few places. Depending on the height of the float, I either rose from a squatting position, or stepped off a stool. I preferred the first method, as the second could result in some nasty accidents.

That’s only three things we ran into!

We started with a box of strawberry jello, made it according to instructions, and poured it into a glass 9 x 13 pan.

We let it refrigerate until it was almost set, but not quite. We then added some peach jello on top of it. (We originally planned to use orange, but discovered that we didn’t have any on hand.) Then we added pepper liberally. Believe me, there is nothing quite like the smell of un-set strawberry and peach jello with an abundance of pepper.

We wanted to up-light our lava, so we balanced the pan between two stools and shone a small light up from the floor. This provided our “glow.”

Then we were all set to film. We set up the tripod and camera and filmed our lava at different angles, with two of us blowing through straws to make the lava bubble.

The overall effect turned out quite well, as you can see.