archived-videos SAMURAI DEAD -- a zombie short film

[glasspixelstudios]

Check out our new zombie webseries: "SAMURAI DEAD"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jjLv4CkTkE

Inspired by WALKING DEAD, MAD MAX, and TWILIGHT SAMURAI, my filmmaking buddies and I decided to shoot our first zombie movie. We shot everything with a Canon Rebel T4i + 18-135mm STM lens, a four-man crew, and no $$$. Hope you enjoy our work. If so, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. We’ll be releasing the next episode next month!

https://www.youtube.com/glasspixelstudios

Thanks!

 

[A.D.]

The problem arises when you have a heavy gradient in your sky and there are objects (like trees) that are in the way

This is where things lke the 'Darken only' can really work. I often find that I don't need any complex masking beyond the horzon grad, but I tend to work at completely different resolutions to film (my most recent composit was an 8000x10000 px headache of a Gimp-crasher.... :S), and obv theres no frame by frame variations jittering around with stills.

I find fore/mid ground trees can be more challenging still. The detail levels and exposure require more finesse than blunt masks can offer.

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edit: PS I Didn't really have time yesterday to type what I wanted to, and if I had the time I would upload some examples to show you the effects of some of the layer blend modes over horizon objects (or lack of), and how they work for me. Just realised that I might have come across as teaching you how to suck eggs. It's because I've seen lots of different appraoches to working with compositing, and unless we can really get into editing on a pixel scale (something that's a lot easier with stills!), I often find that the simpler it's kept, the easier on the eye it looks.

 

[glasspixelstudios]

This is where things lke the 'Darken only' can really work. I often find that I don't need any complex masking beyond the horzon grad, but I tend to work at completely different resolutions to film (my most recent composit was an 8000x10000 px headache of a Gimp-crasher....

Funny you should mention it: If I'm not mistaken, we just recently used the 'darken only' blend mode in one of the sky replacement shots in our upcoming episode. In the shot, the camera pans down from the sky to the title character on the ground and we get a "bottoms-up" view of the clouds. Since we couldn't find source files with any clouds from this vantage point, we faked the clouds using stock footage of fog and blended it into the scene using 'darken only'. It gave us just the right look: Dark, sparse, slow-rolling clouds.

Would love to see your examples. No worries about coming across as teaching us how to "suck eggs". The reason we posted this video was for us to share and learn from others. The day we stop learning is the day we should quit.