POV: Red Birb Challenges You! ⚔
#redbirb #darksouls #short
A commenter quoted the famous Dark Souls Meme on @Hideaki Utsumi shorts video. So in honor of that request, I give you this masterpiece. Truly an imposing Birb indeed. (Sources linked below!)
While this may look like a re-upload with some graphics and dark souls music, 30% of the stock clip was rebuild and animated to fit the musical score. I wanted Red Birb’s body movements to follow the music and build a sense of tension until the release of the devastating Wue Wue Wue. There are exactly 2 major cuts. Can you find where the transitions are? (pssst, read the VFX breakdown xD)
VFX Breakdown:
Health Bar – – – – – –
screenshot of a generic RPG health bar was taken. Each element was then masked and made an independent layer to control and animate ( i.e. Level counter, health bar, health bar frame)
Health Bar and Frame were resized, multiped and animated via keyframes to fill at the desired musical ques.
Level counter was a separate element. single vertical column of text ranging from 1 – 100 was created. Masking out a small window, the entire column is then keyframed to fly past the Health bar frame to simulate the level increasing.
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Cut #1( Jump cut plus digital extension of the clip) – – – – – – – – – –
First is a jump cut when Red Birb jerks its head to the right. While the jerk is all real (only a few frames! Crazy how fast birds are), I needed the birds movement to happen earlier in the musical score. Red Birb wrestled with the towel for quite a bit, so i decided to cut where Birb slowed down and was in focus. Then, just cut to Birb jerking its head. But we got a PROBLEM!
Since I removed some footage to keep time with the music, we are now left with nearly one second gap in footage! How do we fill that time?
I took a screenshot of Red Brid staring at the camera. Then separated into two layers. Foreground being the towel and the background, Red Birb. I wanted to emulate the camera defocusing and refocusing on our mystical red friend. Both layers were then animated to zoom in, with the background layer (Red Birb) zooming in 5% less then the foreground. This disparity in movement will simulate camera parallax and give a sense of depth to the fake camera motion. Lastly, I animated a blur layer over Birb to further emulate camera defocusing.
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Cut #2 (still image and camera shake) – – – – – – – –
The second cut is far less intensive. It’s happens when the camera dives behind the towel to dodge Red Birb’s Wue Wue Wue. At the lowest point of the dodge, a still image is taken. Then, very specific key frames to animate the still image are taken to emulate the natural motion of the camera.
Why not use Camera Shake plugin? Because Camera shake uses random noise to generate its key frames (great for everyday camera shake). But, this image was well stabilized so adding random values breaks the effect when cutting from stabilized footage to noise based generated camera shake. You need to match the camera motion as closely as possible to the the footage, therefore – hand animated!
To distract the viewer from this cut, I placed the intense level counter and health bar animation. While this also fits the theme of the video and supports its story, it also does a good job of distracting you from the fact that its a still image (i hope! :))
Video Elements:
Original Red Birb Video:
Dark Souls Music:
Health Bar Screenshot:
What mod adds the Boss health bar at the bottom of the screen? I want to remove it.
by inskyrimmods
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