Making HuDs

For the film trailer I am going to need several Heads up desplays throught certain parts of it, Specifically the bits that have been done with a hand held camera, and the news reel half way through, To get these effects I will first need to create a transparent image using photoshop of the Hud that I require, I first started by creating a background image to use as a base layer so I could judge how the transparency would work, This is the blue background you can see in the picture, This will act as a sort of "green screen" and be invisible to the camera

 Once I had made this background image I created the base background layer for the actual hud as seen above, then added in any text that I didnt want to be animated within the video.

   

Once this was done I made the background layer invisible leaving me with only the HuD, I exported this image as a PNG so that it will work with transparancy and imported it into my adobe preimer sequence, As you can see below the transparency means that when placed ontop of the footage you can still see the original footage underneth the transparent HuD, while the HuD elements remain ontop of the footage.

 Once the Hud was aligend with the footage I created a new "Roll" title With the text that I wanted to be animated inside of it, and aligned it to the hud where I wanted the text to be place, because it is a roll it means that the text will move from the right side of the screen to the left making it animated within the footage

This gave me my news HuD effect to use within my sequence. I then did a final edit to add opacity keys just to it so that it would fade out at the same time as the video.

Creating titles

Creating the titles for the intial edit of my film trailer, theese are a rough and ready just added in so that I can get an idea of how much overall time my trailer will run in total, I thought it would be a good idea to add in how I make theese while I am at it..

To start off you need to select the new still title from the top of adobe premeire this will create a still image which can be made into titles, sub-titles etc, where rolls and crawls are general used for credits.
once you have selected the default still title a dialogue box opens giving you a wide range of options for your text, heres a quick explanation of what all theese things are.
To start off with all yor basic tools are on the left hand side of the box, this covers things like selecting, cropping, resiszing, aligning the text to one side, creating shapes etc, undernethe the centre screen are a wide arange of preset styles your title could be used as, for now i'm just choosing the default one since its only to give me an idea of how long this trailer will run for,
on the right hand side are all the diffrent font options for the titles, size of the font, shape of it, colours, shadows, the useual amount of things you would get within any text editor,
the key part of this box however is the centre screen, it is from here you can see where your title will be placed within the video and adjust it so that it appears where you want it to be placed, of course you can also adjust its posistion later but its common pratice to get the posistion right the first time.
 this image shows the title box with the title displaying where it will be located within the video clip.
once you have finished editing the title you can simply close the box and and the title will appear within the video libary ready to be placed within the sequence

Creating a studio...

Most film trailers have the logo of the design studio who makes them, so this will go into the process i used to create mine, first we start off in after effects with a new composistion track and add in some text, which i used "Nemisus Studios" based off my gamer tag, this text is using ariel and is orriginal in white for reasons i'll expain in a moment.

 I then got a lava texture from the internet and added it as a seperate layer within the composistion and set the layer mode of the texture to "alpha matte" this uses the "alpha" of the layer above on the texture, since our text was pure white on a black background it means that the white text is invisible and creates the appearence of our text now using the lava texture, I then pre-composited the text into a signel layer to make it easier to work with, and later added in a glowing effect to bring out the colour of the lava a bit more,

I then took the full layer of the text and added in a shatter effect too it.

 Shatter effectivly takes whatever is on that layer and devides it into many peices, it's got a lot of diffrent settings to it, I used the glass setting and increased the radius of it so that it would effect the full amount of text, While also changing the amount it shatters so that it dosnt wildly explode everywhere and added some "viscosity" to the effect so that it appears like its in some sort of fluid, e.g. the lava background

Once I was happy with how the shatter effect was behaving I took both the text layer and the lava background and parented them too each other so that they would move together and set up transform keyframes so they would move down the screen in time, this gave the effect that the text is flowing with the lava and shatters down into it

I then simply rendered the composistion and added it to my main sequence within premiere.

Creating "The Ship"

The main point of this film is that there is a giant ship floating above the city.. now to get this effect.. we need... well a giant ship..

I will be making this ship within adobe maya, not going too overboard with the design of it since i need to keep it simple,


Adobe maya is a 3d modelling tool which allows you to create 3d models these can then be textured and used for a viaity of things e.g. films, pictures, 3d movies etc etc,
We start off with an empty scene as you can see above, we then create a simple shape, and add things too it to create a model, either extruding the sides of the shape, adding new faces on it, smoothing it, its basically like working with modelling clay in that your only limit is your own creativity. After a while you can end up with a ship.. which looks something like this..


We then render this image and export it as a "png" file, this cuts out the background and leaves only the ship, making it easier to add into an image, once this is done we import the ship image into adobe after effects and add it on the layer above the video we want it to be placed in