Circles

Comment by BlancheNoE on May 4, 2012 at 12:24pm

WOW !!!

This is SO cool, Geoff. I am blown away by the isolated pixel effect ! TOTally original and it makes me think of secrets inside secrets.

AWEsome and so very artistic editing and flow.

I love your work.

Comment by Geoff on May 4, 2012 at 3:08pm

Thank you, Amy. The effect is pretty easy to apply though it takes a lot of prep time. I am planning to make a tutorial video but the basic principle is this:

1. Edit together some footage and then apply effects (black & white and pixelization mostly in this example) to identical copies.

2. Make a little animated movie of green shapes moving against a white background.

3. Key out the white from your animated movie (you can key out the green first but it leads to ugly fringing) so you now have the green shapes moving over your footage.

4. Key out the green, using a different version of your footage.

The result, now, will be mobile patches of treated footage moving over the original footage, but in perfect synch.

Do this several times: the black and white version against the colored pixel version of your footage, pixels against the original footage, etc.

Now you have four or five or six pieces of footage that are precisely the same length, that absolutely reproduce the same movements, but are different combinations of colors and effects. If you cut the first piece at the 12 second mark and then the second (or third, or fourth) piece at the 12 second mark, they will snap together as precisely as Legos. I used wipe transitions so you can enjoy the interrupted flow.

The above is essentially all I did in this video. Everything an elaboration of the same idea though it gets rather involved when, for example, you take that completed piece of footage and key it out behind another green and white animated piece...etc.

I sort of felt my way and ran into a few dead ends on the way. The animated green screen business developed out of "Unfold" and especially "Voodoo Cadillac". The first time I keyed out both the white and the green was in my "Passenger" video. This is a test from "Voodoo Cadillac". I learned you get much cleaner results if you animate the green shapes first and then the black borders afterwards. Of course, sometimes you may not want the clean edges.

Step 1 from Geoffo on Vimeo.

I'm sort of hoping that someone else will be intrigued by some aspect of this technique and start playing around with it.

Comment by ThatGirl on May 8, 2012 at 7:41am

Kewlllllll! Dayum, you always come up with some of the most trippin' track selections for your music videos. Very entertaining and the effect was way cool. I'll be back to read thru the instrux when i have time. Thanx for sharing your knowledge with us. I always appreciate sharing!  have a gr8 day, Geoff!

Comment by deepinthewoods on May 8, 2012 at 7:05pm

Great effects, like it

Comment by Geoff on May 15, 2012 at 1:13pm

Doris, I think you do understand this video perfectly! You are just giving me to much credit and assuming there is a deeper meaning. There isn't, it's just an experiment.

Thank you, Paula and ThatGirl. I'm especially interested to see what Paula may come up with.

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