VISUAL EFFECTS

DISPLAY TIME: 0:00 -> 0:50.

TITLE: Zach King Visual Essay
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 5’18”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: This was our last project for this class, and I had to make a visual essay on a VFX pioneer of my choice. The VFX pioneer I chose to make my video on was Zach King. The goal of this project was to take everything we learned from this class and use those skills to create to tell visually compelling story on our VFX pioneer. I did a bunch of research on Zach King, and I was able to find a lot of good information, but the hardest part was actually taking that research and figuring out how I would apply that to my video. I figured out the best way to approach this to separate it into sections which helped tremendously during the editing process. The different sections include an introduction, background information about Zach King, then showing his more recent work, and awards, and then wrapping everything up at the end. This video was really fun to make because it allowed us to be as creative as we want, and I was able to learn so many amazing things about visual effects along the way.

TITLE: Shape Animations
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 0’10”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: For this project we practiced our skills with shape animations. In this, I took the logo of a fake brand I came up with called “Buda Graphic Design” and add some shape animations around it to give it more life. In addition, another key factor we practiced during this was loop animations. We did this by adding a specific code to whatever the layer it that we are looping. In this case it was the circles. It was fascinating to me that even in a video editing and visual effects software, there can still be some sort of coding involved.

TITLE: Loki Short Story 2
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 0’15”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: For this we were asked to create another brief story except this time we had to add something into the scene ourselves. The scene that I chose to edit is a clip from season 2, episode 2 of the ‘Loki’ show on Disney+. What’s happening here is I tried to mask out the original computer screen that is shown and then create my own screen and from there I added my own animation which is really what brought the short story to life. In this I wanted to work on more of the motion graphic aspect which ended up being my favorite part. In “Loki Short Story 1”, I felt as though I didn’t have enough since I mainly just replaced it with text. But this time, I tried adding a motion graphic to try and give the scene more life.

TITLE: Loki Short Story 1
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 0’15”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: In this we were asked to create a short story of whatever we wanted. For mine I chose to edit a scene from season 2, episode 1 of the ‘Loki’ show on Disney+. In this scene Loki is going up to a recording and listening to it, while a little visual appear on the screen to his left. I chose to re-edit the screen and change it with my own ideas. I did this by cutting out the screen of the TV but keeping the border. Then I replaced it with a solid color and added some text with an audio waveform to add to the story of the scene. The most challenging part was cutting out the TV screen and making my own TV screen that I made look realistic enough. My favorite part about this assignment is the fact we got to choose our own footage instead of being provided with some and I chose to edit one of my favorite shows.

TITLE: Green Screen Movie Trailer
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 0’30”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: We were provided a couple different clips with green screens and our job was to take those clips and add whatever background we wanted, while also compiling them together to create some type of imaginary movie trailer. We were able to use this effect in After Effects that reads the green screen and allows you to replace it with whatever you choose. The first clip I edited was one I got to choose on my own and I chose to do a scene from “Avengers: Endgame” and the other two clips were provided for me. One challenge I ran into was it wouldn’t read the full green screen and because of that it doesn’t give that realistic feeling enough which is what I was going for.

TITLE: 3D Text Part 2
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 0’30”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: We were provided footage again, and the idea was practice more create 3D text. This was achieved by adding a camera tracker to track the movements of the footage and then highlighting the area of which we want to change around. This made it so that the text is able to be stationary and give it the 3D effect rather than it follows along with the screen. I also added a glow and drop shadow effect to help the text stand out more. I think the words turned our great for the most part, except I feel as though the word ‘Greece’ doesn’t give that 3D affect enough which is one thing I needed to work on.

TITLE: 3D Text Part 1
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 0’14”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: We were given this footage and with that we had to add a 3D camera tracking effect. Usually when you place text on the screen it will stay there as its stationary position unless you decide to animate it. Since the footage purposely had some sort of movement, the idea was to make it seem like the text was moving around with it, almost as it if it’s actually in that space. This was a bit challenging since this was one of the first times we did 3D effects. The hardest part was making it look realistic enough to make it seem like the text is moving with the footage. I included 4 different words and tried adding some cool animations to some of them, but it would end up making the word glitch a lot.

TITLE: Makeba Music Video Adjustments
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 0’35”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: The footage we were given is a music video of a song by Jain called ‘Makeba’. The goal here was to take 3 different sequences in the music video and replace it with our own animations. This was achieved by cutting out a part of the scene and then replacing it with our ideas. What worked well was the fact that there were certain scenes where you can just cut out an entire area then replace it very easily rather than taking other scenes and having to track each individual movement of a specific area. The most challenging part of this was making the scenes I used look like were in the original video rather than edited out and replaced.

TITLE: Billie Eilish Mask
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 0’40”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: This was our first assignment in this class and also my first time being introduced to After Effects. It seemed confusing at first but after some practice I got used to the basics fairly quickly. Our goal for this assignment was to cut out apart from a Billie Eilish music video and replace the background to give the music video a new setting. I also chose to the include the logo of my fake brand with some text animations to add some more life to the video. The part that was most challenging was keeping the cut-out part of the Billie Eilish music video in the same position while it zooms in because in the video you will notice she is sitting on a bench and then that bench behind her disappears and the background changes when it should have only been focused on her the entire time.

TITLE: Building Disappearance
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 0’10”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: This was the second “disappearance” video we had to create and for this one I chose a video the camera following a boat sailing with some buildings in the background. This time I chose to make a building disappear. This footage was a lot easier to track an object because the motion was a lot slower versus the car disappearance which had a faster motion. This time I did a better job at completely removing the building, giving the more realistic to make it seem like it wasn’t even there in the first place. What messed up with this one is when After Effects tried to replace the background and it ended up making the buildings warp in a weird way.

TITLE: Car Disappearance
MY ROLE: VFX Artist
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects
HARDWARE: Dell XPS 2022
DURATION: 0’10”
DIMENSIONS: 1920 x 1080px
CLASS: FMX 322 – Visual Effects
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER: FA 23
INSTITUTION: The University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: For this, we were allowed to choose our own footage to edit. I chose some dash-cam footage of driving in Dubai at night. We were asked to take something from the video and make it disappear. This is achieved by tracking all the movements of the object you are cutting out and then After Effects will scan the footage and replace the area in which you cut out. This was our first time doing something like this and it did not go well for me. It did not do a good job at completely removing as you can still tell that the car is there. There were also certain parts where I did not cut out the car all the way which makes it difficult to add the effect of taking it out and you could tell since there is this warp effect on the car. I made it harder on myself by choosing this footage since the car is constantly moving and its moving at a fairly quick pace.