Although I still like the video a lot personally. In fact, at the time I uploaded it I figured it was one of our best to date. That was probably affected by the fact that I spent something like 8-9 hours on the effects. Probably more but I can’t remember now. I need to write these things down.

The video itself was for the Nikon Film Festival, which we didn’t make it into. I mean, we made it INTO the contest, but so did two minutes of footage at the public pool taken by some obese lady on a lawn chair. Half of the video consisted of some guy in cut off jeans’ butt as he paced back and forth watching kids swim. Weird.

Anyways, we had fun making it, mostly just Caleb and I taking turns filming, or a random table/chair doing the cinematography (which might explain why we didn’t make it into the contest). Miller, our roommate helped film some too and it was his Impreza that owned me consistently.

Now as to how I did that you can thank Video Copilot for their excellent tutorials. Basically I took footage of myself walking into an empty street, super imposed that on footage of Miller’s car whizzing by, matted out all the footage surrounding me so that I’m standing in the street, and then animated/warped myself along with his car.

The particle effects come with After Effects out of the box, and after some tweaking look like glass. The hood animation was made from a photo of a crushed car that I color corrected to look like (or close to) Miller’s car. That too is courtesy to the guys at Video Copilot. I tried finding my own photo to use but none looked quite as good.

The hazy after-worldly glow was made by duplicating a mask of Caleb a few times, blurring it directionally and messing with blending modes depending on the angle.

Unfortunately the “Bank of Americarp” sign didn’t make it into the final cut. Editing down to 140 seconds was rough, and making decisions like that are part of the deal.

I’ve owned that sign for a long time and never put it to any good use. We had to ‘modify’ it so as to keep branding out of the video. I think the “unnamed” bank should take my marketing scheme into consideration, however. I mean, what’s more patriotic than a red white and blue carp?

Either way, I spend time (like 5 minutes!) on the modifications to that sign so it HAD to make it in somewhere. Not that this blog is anywhere. And the most disappointing part of all of this? This is a side note more than anything connected to the sign, but despite all of the publicity we pushed to get this thing in the contest we have nothing to show for it because it wasn’t originally hosted on Youtube. The view count? Ridiculously low.

Oh well.

The song was Dremples by Sasha, I asked for permission and took his silence as such. I hope he’s ok with that if he ever discovers this on some random internet search binge.

Any other questions? Shoot.

Interesting fact: I didn’t really get shot twice, in case you were worried.

Slightly less interesting fact: I really did win that science champions shirt when I was in 5th grade, and it still (sort of) fits me. Of course, I think every kid that attended won that shirt, but still! I won it.

VASTLY less interesting fact: It’s REALLY cold standing in sub-freezing weather wearing nothing but jeans and a T-Shirt.

I just thought I’d let you in on the disappointing truth of the matter. To make things worse Nikon didn’t even tell me straight up that I didn’t make it in. They simply sent me an Email saying “go see if you made it in!” THEN the site has been down most of the last 24 hours so I had to wait until I was heading out to work at 5:30am today to see if I made it in or not. I can’t even double check right now because it’s down again (due to too much traffic, which seems to be a grave oversight on their part).

I’m assuming,  since my search turned up bupkis and the embedded version of it in a previous post is dead, that it’s been rejected and removed. They didn’t even keep it around… the pain. I need to upload it to our Live Charge YouTube account now if I want anyone to see it.

As for getting up at 5am to go to work, I started a new temporary job extracting venom from bees. Of course I got moved to packaging so I never got to extract any venom, but by the sound of it I dodged a bullet on that one.