Tag Archives: chromakey

University of London online courses

Spikything recently completed a large video production project for University of London, involving taking many of their universities’ courses online (either as distance learning qualifications or MOOCs). Many thanks to our video production swiss-army knife, Napassorn.

The project involved taking raw footage of tutors delivering lectures, keying the footage, cleaning up audio, adding graphics and branding, etc. Some of the footage was low-quality, phone-filmed, making keying tricky; some footage was 4k professionally shot.

The huge amount of assets and people involved means the project needed a reliable mechanism of sharing assets and tracking amends. We created a file-sharing network cluster to enable people working on or reviewing the project to keep things up-to-date easily. We also created a simple online kanban style board for tracking the status of each edit and all deliverables. This helped make the project feel more ‘agile’ and kept work flowing. To help the client deliver things smoothly, we encouraged WIP limits and elevation of constraints to reduce blockages, while the tutors were encouraged to involve themselves in the QA and feedback process as early as possible, to reduce amend cycle time.

Everybody Deserves – music video

I recently worked on this fun little music video. The brief was to take some green screen footage of the band’s lead members and find a treatment that works with the ethos and feel of the song. Since there was not a lot of source footage, I settled on blending the action with various archive reel footage, somewhat like we’re channel flippingĀ a TV. Continue reading Everybody Deserves – music video

Stars – music video

Here’s a music promo I created using some special rotoscoping tricks.

The client wanted some kind of painterly effect. So, after doing a few tests, we settled on a style and started treating the footage. The first step was to chroma key all the shots, since I was planning to composite some together, later adding particle effects in front or behind the various layers.

comp

Once everyone was happy with the edit, I dropped it to 10 frames per second to get a stop-motion look and processed each frame with a proprietary image processing algorithm, to get the painted effect (After Effects plugins weren’t quite doing it for me). The result is rather pretty I think.