Our Tools

"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." - Marshall McLuhan

Thursday, February 23, 2012

Playing With My Puppy


Untitled from Nick Lewis on Vimeo.


This loop my dog doing a trick was a fun shot to mess around with. As I played with the filters I kept trying to stack multiple of the same filter just to see what would happen. In a few cases the effects were pretty cool, such as the mirror effect in the first part, or the find edges effect part way through. What I mostly found though is that the multiple effects did little to nothing different, or made the entire clip completely white or black. Also unsure of what audio to use I kept it in as it was and used it for cues on some of the effects. The only real difficulty was by the end I was trying to find new effects to use, and different ways to tweak them so they appeared radically different.

The first shot is the mirror effect stacked on top of its self a few times at different angles and the find edges filter tweaked a bit to give it that static kind of look. This kind of made it a bit psychedelic and not real quality that I really liked. Next I used a strobe effect  with a few of the echo effects, the multiple echo effects turned the screen mostly white, but with the strobe I found I could still pick out my puppy and his past and future selves. While I liked the end result I have to say this was the worst putting together as having to re-watch it multiple times gave me a bit of a headache. as I started on the third iteration I was messing around with the solar flare, thinking that wasn't really enough I looked at the 3d effects folder and found I could make the whole frame spin, it was then that I decided to keep the audio and use it as a cue. A few scenes later I was looking at getting the magnify filter to move around and it was a decent effect, but not very noticeable, so while trying to make it better, I stumbled upon the effect of stacking multiple find edges filters, I liked the look of it and when playing the video back I saw it really caused the magnify to show itself more. A bit later in the video I made a really interesting effect by stacking 4 clips on top of each other and playing with the pin corner effect, this is probably my favorite shot and the one that took the longest. After that, I used the audio cues again with the twirl effect; this caused it to kind of me similar but still different to the earlier clip where I used the audio cues. A few scenes after I found an effect that kind of simulated something creeping in from the sides, and that combined with a blur effect made a really nice clip, slightly sinister or creepy though, if I choose to use it again it will have to be in kind of a scary clip. The next clip was very nice with 3 clips on top of one another; the back layer being normal and then the next two being wave effects (one inverted). The clip I chose was rather hard to work with at times as I found out that my dog's fur is about the same color as the carpet, so when trying to mess with specific color objects it would either change everything or very little pieces. All in all though I really enjoyed the project

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