Flames in the Hood, a George Laird production

Dear All

This is test material which I haven't finished yet, but I wanted to put it up to show you that with a bit of time, patience and learning, you can do a lot.

I would like to run through how I did this, compositing, is a bit like layers on a cake, the bottom layer in this case is the clip which I used which is called the 'plate' in film terms, and the fire and smoke are the layers, as you can see I have some layers behind others. This is to give an impression of depth.

The first thing I did was to 3d motion track the clip, when you do this, you create markers, when you find a marker where you want to put digital assets (smoke and fire), you then need to create a 3d camera and what is called a null object. The best way to explain what a null object is, think of a nail being hammered into a wall in a room, you walk in and place your jacket on the nail, When you stand at the door you can physically see where your jacket is in 3d space.

When you bring in your digital assets which are 2d, you have to make them into 3d layers, this is done by simply checking a box. So, you get to the place in the timeline where you want the clip, import it and then parent the clip to the null object. This basically allows your clip to stay exactly in the same place when the camera pans across the shot as I have done here.

All the assets you see in this clip are all parented to the same null object, then I just move them into position by using the XYZ arrows and scaling the clips either up or down to fit the location where they are placed.

Then, once you are happy, you can turn all the layers into a single clip and render it out into a movie format, I tend to use MP4.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University