Magazine gun HUD

As I didnt use real guns and I wanted to make the video slightly more futuristic, I looked back at my initial ideas and found the idea to give the magazine of the gun some sort of HUD. It ended up being very easy and working brilliantly.

I started by making a simple bullet shape and the number 10 in Adobe Illustrator and placing the image in After effects.

I motion tracked the magazine, attached the image to it and added a small blue glow

In order to make the image look like it fits in with the scene, I added some glow to the actors hand and the top of the magazine. This really made the image work.

Second edit

After I added the muzzle flares and the first SFX, I wanted to upload my first edit to get audience feedback:

https://vimeo.com/54718225

Making my own Foley

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Foley

During the research of my music videos, I realised that if a sound effect was used, it was foley. This goes for shot films as well. After some extensive research, I found two very good videos explaining what foley is and how to make my own foley sounds.

The first video explains what foley is:

How Foley is Made

And this video explains how to do it on a £0 budget:

Homemade Foley Effects

I took it upon myself to try and make some of my own foley effects. After reviewing my footage, the first sound I knew that I needed to replace was that of the plastic airsoft gun colliding with the wooden floor. It is so obvious that the gun is plastic and very light when it hits and ruins the effect for the film.

During my school day, I was scouring the media, graphics and sports department for any sort of small and heavy metal object. It didn’t take long to find this:

I have no idea what it is, but it makes exactly the same sound as a gun hitting wood/concrete. I wanted to get the sound quickly, so I used my Sennheiser PX-200 Iii headphone microphone and the Voice Memos app on my iPhone 4S and went to work:

It didn’t take long to get a realistic sound. I brough the audio onto my computer using Senuti then brought that to FCP7:

I used the sound for this shot and ended up with the gun sounding like it was metal.

Fight Scene SFX

The fight scene in my music video is the most important scene to get the sound right as all the hits have to sound realistic and painful. I looked at some fight scenes, and in the end I used the fight scene from "Losses" as a reference. The creators of this video made a short video explianing how the made the sound for the film, including the foley for the punches, kicks etc.

I used this as a reference for the sound of the fight. I used the software Sountrack Pro which comes with over 5000 foley effects. With some mixing, I was able to get a sound for every hit and drop.

I started by dragging the edited fight scene into Soundtrack Pro

I didnt see the need to show every sound effect I used, but from this image you can see that I had different tracks for each sound and for every hit I layered certain sounds depending on the hit or surface.

 There were so many layers I had to use a second screen shot.

 

 I dragged the final video back into the time line, ready to edit.

Muzzle Flares

Upon seeing my first edit with no effects or quick cuts, I wanted to get straight into the muzzle flares for the gun. I researched multiple gin shots from the real counterparts to the airsoft guns I used. From this, I was able to create semi-realistic muzzle flares when the actor fires the airsoft gun.

I used After Effect CS5 for all the muzzle flares and did similar techniques for each one:

I started my importing the footage needed into AE

 

Then I added the muzzle flare for 1 frame

 

I then added an ambient glow to show that the flare is interacting with the environment

In order to stylize the flare, I added a short lens flare that I made in Video Copilots Optical Flare plugin

 

This is what it looks like with the flare and the lens flare

For the most realistic flare, you need smoke to come out of the barrel. Real bullets emit smoke when they are shot due to the combustion of the gunpowder.

Extra masking for the flare

Everything layered, the flare is almost done

 I then changed the glow and the flare is done.

I repeated this process for all of my other flares:

Imporing footage to make very rough first edit (FINISH)

Importing footage and making 1^st new edit

The second I finished my second filming session with my new actors and filming at night, I wanted to make a very quick edit as fast as possible in order to see if I needed to re-film anything. I wanted to do this soon so I wouldn’t annoy the actors if things needed to be re-filmed which would make directing them very easy and painless.

The Slide

One of the main effects of the video which I also did in my first edit was the "slide" of the chaser when he was coming round a corner. I got the idea from one of my research videos, "Dubstep Guns", where one of the characters slides round a corner without moving and then raises his guns up. I'm not sure exactly how they did this, but I had a good idea as so how. This was one of the more labour intensive effects to do, however due to its un-realism, it works well in a music video.

I used After Effects CS5 for the compositing, these are the steps I took to make it

The first thing i had to do was film a clean plate of the background and then film the actor on a green screen so I could easily seperate him from the background.

I masked out just the actor and some of the green leaving the clean shot to show through.

 Using Keylight, I keyed out the green from the actor so it now looks like it is just one shot and not two layered.

In order to actually make the slide, I keyframed that layer with the actor on it to come in from the right of the screen. Motion blur was added so it looks less fake and then I ramped the speed

To make it look as if he was coming from behind the wall, all I did was duplicate the clean plate, mask out the wall section and put that on top of everything.

Finally I added a shadow to follow him, keyframed the camera to bulge in and out and then added it to my edit.

Fight Scene SFX

The fight scene in my music video is the most important scene to get the sound right as all the hits have to sound realistic and painful. I looked at some fight scenes, and in the end I used the fight scene from "Losses" as a reference. The creators of this video made a short video explianing how the made the sound for the film, including the foley for the punches, kicks etc.

I used this as a reference for the sound of the fight. I used the software Sountrack Pro which comes with over 5000 foley effects. With some mixing, I was able to get a sound for every hit and drop.

I started by dragging the edited fight scene into Soundtrack Pro

I didnt see the need to show every sound effect I used, but from this image you can see that I had different tracks for each sound and for every hit I layered certain sounds depending on the hit or surface.

 There were so many layers I had to use a second screen shot.

 

 I dragged the final video back into the time line, ready to edit.