Telemetry Thursday, September 03, 2009 | comments:
Telemetry is a technology that allows remote measurement and reporting of information. I thought the name was fitting for my first HUD (heads up display) animation. Check it out:
View this movie larger HERE
I still haven't gotten a hold of a camcorder, so I shot this using my cannon digital still-camera. I used a ironing board as a tripod and a giant blank canvas to diffuse the light. Cleaning up the video in After Effects was quite a chore - the image to the right is what the original video looked like (actual size too)! I had to remove all the red - the hardest part was the darker shadow on the red wall. I ended up using an inverted luminance Track Matte on the video - this basically takes the luminance - or gray scale data for an image and uses that to determine what parts of the image are transparent, leaving me with something like this:
The checker board indicates what parts are transparent - allowing me to place something else behind the video and fill in the transparent areas.Using the built in motion-tracking in After Effects, I was able to track the movement of my eyes. I tried several sections of my face to use as a tracking point and ended up having the best results with the left eye. This is where the big 3D glasses came in handy. The motion tracker analyzes the video and tries to follow a predetermined section of pixels. You can then use this data and attach anything you want to it - essentially following whatever motion the left eye is doing. This worked great but it only gave me the movement for left/right/up/down. I needed to hand animate the rotations so the HUD elements always appear to be sitting in front of the face when turning my head.
Creating the actual HUD elements was the funnest part of this video. I wanted to be sure it had some depth to it so I went with the three-circle targets. The target closest to the eye is a simple rotating dial. The second contains the audio spectrum and some type of shield indicator. The third had the binary code, status updates, and flickering screen. Animating how these appear and interact with each other was a lot of fun. I had so many different versions of this I made, but I eventually went with something more subtle and fitting for the music.Once the HUD animation was finished and following the face... I created a light that followed the HUD. This is very subtle, but gives the video the sense that the light on my face is being emitted by the HUD and changing as the HUD rotates around. Again, this is subtle but one of those things that really gave the scene more depth.
I then added the color bars animation to the background of the video. I generated this using the Red Giant: Text Anarchy/Geomancy plug-in "Grid Squares". I used the audio spectrum of the music to drive the evolution of the color bars, creating a cool abstract background that is synced to the music. I also attached the color bars background to the left-right movement of the light I created... making it appear as if the background is rotating behind my head as I look left or right (more depth!)
All that was left at that point was color correction and distortion. The distortion to the video was created using a displacement map. Displacement maps are a little complicated to explain, but it essentially warps the video like a TV with bad reception or a video with bad tracking. I used the "Magic Bullet Looks" plug-in to make the HUD glow bright-blue.
The crazy head spinning wasn't intended to be in the video originally, but after attaching the music - it fit in perfectly. I used After Effects time-remapping to speed up and slow down the video to go along with the crazy drums in the song.
The music is a track called "Stem Long Stem" by DJ Shadow. I liked how it had a nice soft melody that got more intense as the song went on.
Overall this little experiment wasn't exactly what I set out to do, but it evolved into a really fun project that I hope people enjoy as art and not simply some slick effects.
Whats next?
Labels: After Effects, Animation, HUD, Telemetry
