For some reason, people want to decapitate their actors in film. If you’re serious about it  you may want to think twice about putting a blade to your actors neck. Fortunately, using some basic rotoscoping techniques we can achieve the desired effect. In the second part of this tutorial you’ll learn the basic methods behind masking and learn a couple of ways to apply them to your scene. You’ll see how to create a “blook-like” [...]

One of the biggest troubles of a low budget action film, is often the use of prop guns lacking any form of flare. So the task is set to create one somehow during post-production. There’s lots of techniques to creating a muzzle flash for you films. If you’re thinking on a larger scale, then I’d reccommend attempting to get hold of some stock footage of keyed gunshots against a black backgrounds. In this tutorial however [...]

In this Tutorial I show you how to import images into After Effects to use as Textures or Backgrounds for your Motion Graphics or titles. There should be some teqniques shown in it that’ll help you whatever your after, and remember to download the texture pack from the previous post if you’re interested in giving it a go yourself without any of the effort of finding textures yourself! Watch Video

So I managed to get hold of a DSLR over the weekend and decided to use it to compile a small selection of textures for you all to use in your projects. It’s a .zip format compilation of things ranging from natural woods and brick textures, to more man made items like polyesters and styrofoam. They should be great for creating a more grungy feel background to your motion graphics, or chromakey work or even [...]

Scriptwriting is a big part of pre-production when planning a film. It’s where all the imagination begins. So it’s useful to have a tool that will let you do that, in a previous post I linked you to some awesome software called CeltX which you can download completely free. In this video I teach you some basic scriptwriting tecniques and give you a breif tour of CeltX and how to use it. Feel free to [...]

I’ve had to draw up some storyboards for a project module on my course at University, so being the useless artist I am I don’t trust myself with a ruler a pencil enough to evenly sketch out boxes. So instead I thought I’d design some (widescreen) panels for me to draw my ideas onto. The panels are left aligned with area on the right to scribble down any notes about the frame. If you wanted [...]

Chromakeying is one of the trickiest things to get right and look good. Fortunately After-Effects and most video packages come installed with some form of “Keying” effects that allow you to remove a background from the subject. In this video I’ll walk you through the workflow I used when doing the Greenscreening during the production of Open Up Your Eyes. I also cover some very basic colour grading, by demonstrating how I achieved the black [...]

If you’ve ever wondered tried to go about writing a script for a movie, one of your first moves was probably writing your screenplay inside something like Word, or Notepad. Now, although these are reasonably good writing packages it’d be better to get something a little more bespoke and actually DESIGNED for Scriptwriting. For the past year or so I’ve been using this one piece of software named Celtx. It’s completely free for basic users, [...]

If you’re starting in the film world and have a multiple camera or audio set up. I recommend picking up one of these. A clapperboard. If you’re not sure what it’s used for, they’re often used as a way of syncing multiple audio/video streams together. Here’s how it works: The “Clapper” will stand in front of the camera with the details of the shot written on the board for the camera to see, they would [...]

I’ve always felt a bit so-so about the special effects team for Torchwood and Doctor Who. As far as I’m aware they’re done by some in house effects company called “The Mill”. Usually I’m pretty acceptable of some of the shoddy work they’ve released over the years because they seem to make up for it with environmental effects and you can often look past it if the episode has a good story or whatever. However, [...]