This page is for those of you that are interested in how I created some of the special FX media that I post on here for the blog. As I have said before I am a keen graphic designer, video editor, special FX artist and 3D animator, so doing a project like this really allowed me to show off my ability to you all. So lets get started on a few things...
The Destruction of Stevenage Town
For anyone that lives here, calm down, we are not under attack, the town centre is still standing tall and nothing has been bombed or destroyed. Here is the original picture of the town centre taken from my window with my Sony DSLR - A100
It looks quite normal doesn't it? The multi story car park there looking good as new. I really wanted to go to town (mind the pun) on this picture and really show some full on destruction, however with the time frame I had and the speed of the story progression I was stuck to only add a limited amount of carnage. It was done in adobe photoshop for the general destruction of the walls, and I used adobe after effects to add the fire, smoke & finally 3d studio max to render out a few Chinook helicopters. It took about 5 hours to do and as you have already seen, here is the final outcome...
Again with the other picture of High Plash Flats, the exact same thing was done to turn this...
into this...
I do prefer this image it looks much more frightening, I do apologise to anyone who lives in High Plash who has just seen this, don't worry, your building isn't on fire as much as those darned fire alarms keep going off all the time (anyone who lives in these blocks will appreciate that.)
Robyn's Transformation
So My wife Robyn did some great acting for her part as she slowly became infected and turned into a zombie. However the poor girl has actually spent the last week suffering from a terrible case of Tonsillitis. She has in fact actually been asleep really ill all week. The pictures of her lying there with a flannel on her head and under a blanket actually isn't for show...
The above pic was taken when she was asleep and out of it, I just saw it as the perfect opportunity to incorporate into my story. I was going to kill her off anyway (love you really) however she looked like death warmed up without the make up.
Here is the original picture of Robyn
As you can see, she has her colour back, and even looks quite cheerful. So after putting her into photoshop, I duplicated the layer twice, desaturated the first layer, then with the second layer I drew around her skin with the pen tool selected 'make selection' then cut it. So what you ended up with was a colour picture, but a black and white skin tone. I then brought in a high quality texture of a veiny, bruised ill looking skin, placed it below the cut layer, above the desaturated layer and set the transfer mode to 'multiply' brought the opacity down to 70% and we have the grey skin. I used the paint brush on low pressure and large radius to paint a darkened effect round the eyes. I then greyed out the pupils of the eyes and finally downloaded a picture of a movies zombie, cut the mouth out and transferred it onto Robyn's face so she looked like she was growling at the camera. We now have our final result...
Quite a difference really, I am quite impressed on how well this came out, without using any Hollywood make up either.
The zombies in the street
Okay, this was pretty quick and easy. I Just took a photo of the road, downstairs from my window. I then used 3d Studio max 2009 to add some 3D characters into the scene, After posing them texturing them and generally making them look like zombies, I rendered out a still png image on complete black so the alpha matte could be used. Then in Photoshop I placed the png image over the actual image and this was the final result...
The Window YouTube Video
Now this one gets me the most questions, how did I create the video of me standing in front of the window with hell breaking out behind me? Simple. I stood by my actual window, trying my best not to cross over the window frame and talked to the camera on a tripod. I then found some old war footage of Baghdad being bombed in 2003 Here is that actual video I then went into adobe after effects, placed the bombing video over my own window and masked out the window frame and also any of my own body that crossed over the video footage. I added a camera shake to make it look hand held, added some stock war sounds (they really make the effect come to life) and finally the ceiling dust was stock footage. Here is the final result
