Video of the Week: Ninja Tactics

This week's video of the week is called Ninja Tactics. Check out the short video below:



This was made for an Android app competition, and it was a lot of fun to make! I have never filmed anything like parkour before, and so it was quite a new experience for me. The producer contacted some members of the CBR Stunt Team (be sure to check out their Facebook page), and they were great to work with, and very accommodating. They were willing to do whatever we asked them to do, and we got some pretty impressive stuff. So if you're needing any stunts for a movie or anything, be sure to contact these guys.

This was actually the first video I've done where I shot with two cameras, and it was really nice to have the extra coverage. I am going to try to always shoot with two cameras from now on. For instance, there is a shot in the BYU Library where Jeff lives wins the game, and he stands up and does a fist-pump and shouts "YES!". Well, we were "stealing" shots in the library (this means that we didn't have permission to shoot there, so we had to do it quickly), and so we only had one chance at getting this shot. So we set up the two cameras, one directly in front of Jeff that was a little zoomed in on him, and then I stood back really far with a wide lens (the Lumix 14mm f/2.5) to capture the reaction of the students in the library, and we just told him to go for it. The reaction of the students is genuine, as it was pretty quiet in the library at that point. My shot ended up being a bit shaky, so I stabilized it in After Effects with Warp Stabilizer, and now it looks like it was shot on a tripod. Warp Stabilizer is amazing.

The editing was pretty straight-forward. Isaac programmed levels on the app based on the video, and we filmed Jeff playing the app so we could jump back and forth between the game-play and the actual video. The idea of showing Jeff in the library playing the game (where there is no music at all), came up during the editing, and I think it really helps show that Jeff is "in" the game. Below is a screenshot of the Sony Vegas timeline of the finished video.

Click to see it bigger

The shiny treasure thing at the end was made by rendering clouds in Photoshop, and then bringing those into After Effects and animating them to grow and fade away. Those layers just repeat themselves, and then I added a color balance effect to change it to yellow. Then I tracked the glowing orb to the video layer, and wallah! Ninja gets the treasure.

So that's the basic gist of how we did it. Be sure to head on over to the Ninja Tactics Facebook page and "Like" the page, and if you have an Android phone or tablet, go to the Google Play website and download it and get playing!

Video of the Week: The Fight

To the literally several people who frequent my blog, I have decided to spotlight one of our videos per week, and just go through the process of how we made it. So here it goes.

This week's Video of the Week goes to The Fight. We filmed this back around Christmas of 2005 (back when we had a dial-up connection!). Just a bunch of guys fighting with lightsabers. This was originally made for the first ever "Noob Film Competition" at the Star Wars Fan Site TheForce.net, which it won.



We filmed this in an afternoon at our local church. Back then we were shooting on the Canon GL-1, which was an excellent camera. I loved the manual controls on that thing. Anyway. There were only three of us there, and so when all three of us were in the shot, the camera was just on a tripod, and then when Brian "died", he operated the camera.

Props were just the plastic lightsabers that you can get at Walmart, with the blades taken out and 3/4" PVC stuck in there as the blades. I then painted the blades with bright orange construction paint so that the blades would be easier to see in post when it came time to rotoscope them. I then used packing tape (one strip to go up the whole length of the blade) to protect the orange paint from chipping. It's been a long time, but I think I even poured sand into the lightsaber handles and poured hot-glue on top of that to add some weight to the handles so that it was more balanced when you were swinging them around.

The force choke effect was done by me standing on a chair while Tyler acted like he was choking me, and then we filmed a background plate (all with the camera on a tripod), and then in post I just roto'd the chair out.

The opening logo was made in 3DS Max. Editing was done in Premiere, and the rotoscoping was done in After Effects (back then it was version 5.5!), using Ryan Wieber's first lightsaber method. (He has since updated that method with a more precise and less monotonous method). This was on our Christmas break from school, and so I sat down and knocked out the rotoscoping in about 4 days.

We all had a lot of fun making this one, and maybe one day we'll do a sequel?

Some other great lightsaber fight videos include Ryan vs. Dorkman I and II:





And Duality: