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!