Horror Film - Need help w/ final touches

ArtVandelay wrote on 9/23/2005, 8:40 PM
I posted last week about a horror short film contest I entered and got some great suggestions. I have done a rough edit and am trying to finish some final touches tonight and tomorrow. There are several things I could use suggestions on.

1 Title- I want the letters on the title to appear to be dripping blood. I would like the title to appear on the screen and then after a couple seconds, the letters will appear to be dripping blood. ( I did a search in the forum on this one and found a post from '03, where a veg or tutorial for doing this was mentioned on the Vasst site, I couldn't find it there, in that post they were talking about the effect seen in the intros to some James Bond movies).

2. Dream Sequence - there is a couple flash-backs in the movie, I would like them to appear black and white with a kind of cloud or haze around the edges. Is this possible?

3. Jerky or jumpy footage- there is small segment where I would like the footage to appear a little jerky, kind of like from on old 8mm film. What would be the best way to do this? I thought maybe I could render this portion with a different frame rate, instead of 30 fps, maybe 20 fps. Would that work, or is there a better way?

The software I have to work with is Vegas 4, Photoshop Elements 3, and an old copy of alamdv 2.1.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Dave

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 9/23/2005, 8:51 PM
1 Title- I want the letters on the title to appear to be dripping blood. I would like the title to appear on the screen and then after a couple seconds, the letters will appear to be dripping blood. ( I did a search in the forum on this one and found a post from '03, where a veg or tutorial for doing this was mentioned on the Vasst site, I couldn't find it there, in that post they were talking about the effect seen in the intros to some James Bond movies).



2. Dream Sequence - there is a couple flash-backs in the movie, I would like them to appear black and white with a kind of cloud or haze around the edges. Is this possible?

Try Stonefield's tutorial on Vegasusers.com with your images converted to B/W, or view the



3. Jerky or jumpy footage- there is small segment where I would like the footage to appear a little jerky, kind of like from on old 8mm film. What would be the best way to do this? I thought maybe I could render this portion with a different frame rate, instead of 30 fps, maybe 20 fps. Would that work, or is there a better way?

Right click media, choose properties, and then set a slow undersample. This will give you a weird, jerky feeling. Coupled with a little bit of film look minus scratches/noise/dust....it should work well.
ArtVandelay wrote on 9/23/2005, 9:04 PM
Thanks Spot, just what I was looking for... I didn't think to do a search on Vaast for James Bond veg, I was entering "Blood Drip" in the search box.
Spot|DSE wrote on 9/23/2005, 9:13 PM
you're welcome, and thanks to your post, I've added new keywords to the project so it can be found more easily.
ArtVandelay wrote on 9/23/2005, 9:18 PM
Spot,

I ran into a problem with the James Bond veg, it is written for Vegas 5b. I am using Vegas 4. When I try to open the veg, I get an error stating "Unsupported File Format". Is there any workaround?

If not, I'll figure something else out. I am using your Glamour tutorial for the dream sequence.

Thanks
Spot|DSE wrote on 9/23/2005, 9:41 PM
Darn...there is no workaround, unfortunately. Vegas isn't backwards compatible. Moreover, the veg makes heavy use of Bezier masks, which can't be done in Vegas 4....

One thing you can do to get transparent blood is to color some warm Karo syrup with red food coloring.
Set up a piece of glass that's over top of green construction paper or green posterboard, squirt the Karo on the glass. let it run down at speed. Shoot it with your camera. Then you can easily speed up/slow down the footage in your Timeline.
ArtVandelay wrote on 9/23/2005, 10:48 PM
One more question if I may....I have several video and audio tracks, how do I lock all the events on all the tracks so I can insert the credits at the beginning? I know on a single track I can right click and select "events to end" and then slide things up or down the track, but I wasn't sure how to to this with multiple tracks.

Thanks
busterkeaton wrote on 9/23/2005, 11:22 PM
YOu can choose to "INSERT TIME" at the beginning of the project and the put in 10-15 secs of blank time.



I just saw the new Jim Jarmusch picture. Broken Flowers and they had a few dream sequences that they handled though different "movie looks" from the rest of the picture. The dreams were mostly remembering scenes we already saw, so the different looks jumped out at you. It worked pretty well.