Sin City Agent

Hello, this is a walkthrough of what I did for my Sin City Agent video.

I wanted to combine the look of the Sin City trailers with the Matrix universe. An Agent seemed to be the logical choice of subject matter due to the high contrast in their appearance. The main parts I wanted to emphasise in the Sin City style were:

• The glasses
• The tie clip
• The shirt
• The earpiece

Another linking attribute I wanted to include was rain, which was to be done digitally.

Step 1
Filming the Footage

I wanted to include a sweeping camera move throughout the clip, so there were two options; I could either build a rig and have the camera spin around me¹, or I could spin myself round and fake background movement later². I chose the latter.

I knelt upon an office chair in front of a greenscreen and pushed myself round using a broom handle (hi-tech, I know), aiming with a toy gun in time with the fading momentum. I had previously sprayed myself with water to help sell the fake rain later. This would mean the suit would reflect light and my hair would be wet. There was also a light flashing to simulate lightning.

I intended to rotoscope (draw frame-by-frame) highlights over the sunglasses, so to help identify them later I wrapped them in tin-foil. It didn't help at all!³

Step 2
After Effects, and the Fake Background/Camera movement

Now I had video of me spinning round on an office chair. Not so impressive so far, so the next step was to create an interesting background that would mimic the camera movement. I created this by patching together photographs that I'd taken.

Because I was faking a 360° spin, I needed a background that'd cover 360° - so this matte painting is designed to loop without seams (hopefully). This was done in Photoshop.

In After Effects, the footage was keyed and scaled up so the greenscreen reached the edges of the composition. The new background was then dropped in.

Looking better! Now to fake the camera movement upon the background, the Offset effect was applied. This means (roughly) that the layer can scroll within itself. The 'Shift Center To' attribute was adjusted and keyframed so the background spun round at the same speed I did on my chair.

I then blurred the background a little and lowered the brightness. To make the movement a little more realistic I added motion blur. The next step was to keyframe the brightness to lighten when the 'lightning' affected my video footage.

   

I then desaturated the video footage (Hue/Saturation effect) and upped the Brightness and Contrast.

Step 3
The Glasses, the Tie Clip and the Earpiece

To make the glasses I created a white solid (Layer>New>Solid) and with the pen tool drew a mask around the right frame (the red line).

The yellow line you see there was a subtraction mask used for when my arm crosses over the glasses. Now the fun part was to keyframe the red mask to fit the glasses throughout the length of the clip.

Next was to do the left frame. This was incredibly tricky because it should be symmetrical with the right, and became just like trying to draw both sides of a wine bottle.

   

I found it useful to temporarily up the contrast and brightness on the footage to see the glasses more easily.

The tie clip was done in exactly the same manner as the glasses, just masking around, er, masking tape instead.

The earpiece was a little more complicated. I had done tests wearing an earpiece, but it was just so small to effectively rotoscope. In the end the earpiece was created completely digitally. To begin, I created a black solid (rather than the white ones earlier) and set its transfer mode to screen. This meant that anything black would be transparent and that anything white (like an earpiece) would be opaque.

So now I had a transparent layer underneath my video footage. Next I applied the Beam effect (Effect>Render>Beam), and set start and end points roughly where an earpiece would be.

I then keyframed these two positions throughout the length of the clip. I then duplicated this beam layer and placed the copy above the video footage. The opacity was adjusted on both layers so that when the earpiece was behind the footage the lower layer was visible - but when the earpiece was above the footage, the higher layer was visible.

Next step was to add the coil of the earpiece. This was drawn in Photoshop.

This coil was then positioned/rotated/scaled to fit along the ear beam and keyframed for the length of the clip. Then as before a copy was made to go above the footage when needed.

Step 4
Rain

The rain was created using the CCRain plugin from Cycore Effects FX 1.0, but similar effects can be created by playing around with the Particle Playground (Effect>Simulation) for a while. CCRain allows you to specify amount, speed, angle amongst other things. As with the Beam effect, a black solid was created and set to screen. The CCRain effect was applied. To start with, these were the settings:

I then desaturated the rain and altered the levels a little.

Because the rain is falling left to right when the Agent is facing us, it should fall right to left when his back is to us. So I keyframed the angle of the rain (in the CCRain settings) so during the camera spin, the rain would change direction too. The speed attribute was timed to slow the rain down in time with the camera spin.

So now there was rain behind the agent, but not in front. So the footage layer were duplicated and hidden (eye poked out). The new rain layer was also copied and placed under the hidden footage layer. With the rain layer selected, I chose the hidden footage layer as an Alpha Matte.

This would mean that the rain would only show over the agent and not over the background rain. Oddly I left the rain settings the same, so I suppose the same effect could be achieved by having the first rain layer on top of everything. Oh well!

Step 5
Finishing Touches

Nearly done!

I noticed that at the end of the clip, the gun wobbled round quite a bit (from me trying not to fall off my office chair) so I enabled time remapping (Layer>Enable Time Remapping) and slowed the end portion down so the aiming section was slower (and therefore cutting out a lot of the wobbling). I should have done the same to the rotoscoped elements, but I forgot. D'oh. (This is why the glasses seem to wobble around a little near the end, because they were created over the original footage).

To get the soft glow seen in the Sin City trailers, I created a new composition with the same settings as before, and added the previous composition in twice - setting the topmost copy to 'Screen'.

That finishes the video work in After Effects! All that remained to do was to piece together a soundtrack within Premiere!

I hope this has been of some use for you, ideas, improvements or comments? - let me know!

_{¹ If you're interested in building a camera rig for Matrix movements, you should definitely check out Ryan Wieber's Project White Rabbit.
² A good example of what can be done is Colin Levy's On the Brink.
³ Later told: if you want to make those kinds of glasses/bandages effects easier, get a black light, and paint the lenses with fluorescent matieral. They should saturate quite easily in that case, and then you won't have to rotoscope and the effect will remain more natural and textured.}