Meaning of life by Richard Hilton

By Richard Hilton
Staring Nick Temple

started March 24th 2000 finished june 6th 2000

here is the story board for the movie:

"In the Fall of 1999 Patrick Henry decided to be a pilot school for the distribution of milk in plastic bags. Students drinking from these bags were harassed and the ingestion of milk ceased. Some students have complained of softening of the bones, a condition commonly known as Osteoporosis. In the Spring of 2000, young Nick Temple, ironically and paradoxically, stumbled upon The Meaning of Life. Coincidence? You be the judge."

I made this movie in Highschool in a computer multimedia class. I compressed it using a farely common Video Codex, but your computer (especially if it's old) might not be able to play the file. It requires the Quick Time player.

Click here to watch the movie (it is 4 minutes in)

Here is a Screen shot of the Project rendering:

I also have the whole project burned onto 2CDs so if I realy wanted to i could go back and change it around or add to it. I also wrote a small text file after finishing it. Here it is:

Aplications used:
After Effects 4.0
Boris FX
Bryce 3D
Poser
Infini-D

Computer used: G3 400 (Mac) 384 MBs of ram

Story Board: "storyboard.bmp/gif" (the image above) is how this movie idea started. The power went out one day, and Mr. Hatch and I drew out a storyboard for a movie based on special effects, more than story line. But the story line does have a deeper meaning..

Blue Screen: For a Blue screen, Mr. Hatch bought a roll of blue cloth, and pinned it too the wall. It worked pritty well. Maybe a little thin, and dark, but since Nick wore light cloths, it turned out ok. In the begining of the movie, when Nick was danceing, he was wearing a dark blue shirt, so it didn't key out very well at all.

UnMult: UnMult is a great Keying aftereffects filter Mr. Hatch found listening to his multimedia audio tapes, while driving down the free way. I used it to key out fire that has a black background. It's highly recomended if you use media like Pyromania.

Fire time-remapping problem: After working on the movie for a month or so, the project was getting very cluttered. There were 8 compesition, and footages files scattered everwhere. This wasn't a problem, because when they all came together, it looked good. Until it started to crash. The Mac would lock up in the same place every time I tried to render the entire movie. There was no reason that I could see why it would do that. So the trouble shooting began. I Removed footage, and changing qualitys over and over again, testing to see if it would crash or not. Finally, it came down to 1 footage file that was causing the problem. The "StartingFire.Mov" from the pyromania CD. I had time re-mapped it, so the fire transitioned smoothly from going forward, to going backwards, to make it look like Nick was putting it out. Every time After Effects tried to render the fire, it would crash. Even if it was just rendering the fire by itself, and nothing else in the composition. To Solve this problem I rendered the project without fire, and then added the fire in Premeir. The bad part about that is, the fire looks terible because Premeir can't use the "unmult" filter that makes the fire look so good in After Effects. Premeire uses a Lumanace Key to take out the background in the fire, which makes the fire have a ugly black outline around it. A couple of days later, i re-rendered the fire in After Effects without time re-mapping, and made another footage file in premear with the fire reversed (called reversfire.mov). Then i made another After effects project file called "add fire in AFX.aep" and added the fire to the finished movie. That took way to long to solve.....