EXCELSIOR The Movie: One Year Anniversary

EXCELSIOR The Movie: One Year Anniversary: Hello everyone, we just wanted to put up a short post commemorating the first year anniversary of the filming of Excelsior! Even though we n...

Bartlett Productions Update #6 - Courier

Courier from Bartlett Productions on Vimeo.

Courier started out as a short video to document the state of our driveway. I don't like making videos that don't have much of a point, though, so Peter had the idea to turn it into a BF commercial.
I thought it would probably take around half an hour to complete it, but ended up taking around 3 hours. The problem was that by the time we finished filming, the road had pretty well dried out. The road is usually quite a bit worse that time of year, but we didn't get much snow last winter. I have the tendency to get discouaged when things don't go as planned, but we decided we'd do what we could in post and finished filming.

I decided to try a real aggressive color grade on the entire film to make it look sort of like this. The gray theme also complemented the silver van.

AE screenshot.

The CC effects.

I didn't have the CC quite as strong at first, but I accidentally pasted the CC effects on a clip twice and it looked much better. Thus the double effects.

Here are some before and after color correction/effects stills:

 

Before effects

After effects ;-)

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

As you can see, I added in the sun in almost every scene, either on the horizon, edge of the frame (to make it look like it is shining past the camera), or on Peter's sunglasses.

I manualy tracked those BTW.

Andrew Bartlett

Help Mr. Gunn Find the Greatest Food in the World!

Colin Gunn Invites You on a Journey to Find the Greatest Food in the World--The Introduction from Douglas Phillips on Vimeo.
On July 12-14 Christians from across the United States of America will be coming to San Antonio as part of the Reformation of Food and Family Conference. But before they arrive, Colin Gunn will be paving the way by going on a journey in search of the greatest food in the world. Join him on the journey as he investigates organic food, raw food, junk food, Kosher foods, GMOs, local foods, and so much more. Then join him on Facebook with your own ideas and comments. Go to https://www.facebook.com/thefoodconference

Or sign-up for the Reformation of Food and Family Conference by going to www.visionforumministries.org

Bartlett Productions Update #5 - KXB TV

On the 3rd of March, Jonathan and David were at the Kenney's place and filmed a short news story and some other things using the Kenney's green screen to congratulate Caleb on his graduation from ALERT basic training.
My job was to make the graphics for "KXB News."
I'd done some animation in After Effects before for the Bartlett farm Pork commercial and "Farewell Friend!", but nothing too extensive.

At that time, the power supply on our graphics computer died. It was a Corsair CX600 that we put in to run a graphics card. Corsair was good about replacing it, but it was still a delay.
Meanwhile I used the laptop and designed the logos.
I should of looked around a bit more at real news logos to get a better idea (we don't watch tv), but Hannah sent this video by JostieFlicks.com that was the effect she was wanting, so I got to work.

All but the "TV" part is just text with a gradient and a drop shadow. The "TV" is made with Blender rendered with Cycles.

Within a few days we got the new power supply and I got to work with Adobe After Effects.
The first thing I made was the intro:


I found the music on Microsoft Office Clip Art  (a great recourse by the way) and then based the timing off it. That always makes it more powerful!

I wasn't really sure what to do for a background because they always are real vague and yet complicated looking! I started by making some stuff spinning around etc. and then in the background of that I used an animation preset under "backgrounds" called "blocks" or at least something similar. I exported the KXB logo as a Photoshop .psd file since I still haven't switched over to Photoshop from Fireworks yet, then when I insert it into After Effects I can adjust everything as if it were made right in After Effects. I made it so that when the text shattered in, a lens flair would turn on/off.

I then animated the camera. All of the layers except the blue solid behind the "blocks" have 3D switched on. Looking back I probably wouldn't have had the camera go quite so far to the right before zooming in, but I'm learning!

The name bar was biased of the Jostie Flicks one, but I added the little cube flipping around. I've seen things like that on news stations before. The cube was made by duplicating the panels and then rotating them around to form sides (3D mode). I then parented them to a null object to make it easier to animate.

For the split screen, I based it off of this video (Ron Paul on CNN just because I knew where to find it!) I made all but the stuff moving in the background in Fireworks, exported as a .psd. To make it so Hannah could use it with Adobe Premiere Elements I made the spaces where the people go a bright green color like a green screen. That way she could just key it out.



I made the outro basically like the intro, so there's not a whole lot more to say, but throughout the process I learned a lot of new things that I can put to use elsewhere!



It definitely could be better, but it was good practice.

Salvation belongeth unto the LORD: thy blessing is upon thy people. Selah. - Psalm 3:8

Andrew Bartlett

My First Painting

Maybe I should say "My first attempt to paint an actual object using Photoshop (instead of just sloping paint around)", but you get the idea. I was inspired by Isaac Botkin's work on the Navigating History DVD and book covers. I want to be able to do that someday, so here I start:

I still have a long way to go for sure!

Andrew Bartlett

Appleseed Shoot: Saturday April 28th, Minot ND

I plan to be there! (Although not as a shooter, more on that as soon as I get to it.) Get more information here: http://appleseedinfo.org/smf/index.php?topic=26117.0

Andrew Bartlett

Courier - New Bartlett Farm Commercial!

Just curious, can you tell me what I changed in the footage?

Andrew Bartlett