A transporter, alternate 'Life of Death' and 'My Llanelli' titles

This is a sci-fi transporter effect I've been working on for a while. It's taken a while to sort out, for various reasons (mainly my never being happy with me own work), but I'm going to say it's finished now.

It was originally intended to look like the Asgard beams from Stargate SG-1, but I kept adding things to it. You can still see the original 'white out' style of the Asgard beams underneath the rest of the effect. I like this piece, overall.

Technical notes: Shot in my good friend Sue's front room (thanks for being an on-set dog handler, Sue!)
and in the Graig media studio, with a PD170 camera. I used Particle Illusion to make the energy and particle effects, with all the masking, the glow, the cloning (had to remove some stray light reflections), other effects and overall compositing done in After Effects. Apologies for the low resolution on this clip, it had to be done to get the file size down, even using H264 compression. Full size version is MUCH better.




An alternate version of the 'Life of Death' title. The original was made on quite short notice, with a simple concept that used up RAM like nobodies business. It can be seen over at Dai Jeffcoate's showreel blog, as well as the accompanying crystal effects that were needed. I made this alternate title because I just wasn't happy with the original, which I think looks quite ugly, looking back at it. I'm not happy with the original crystal effects either, but I'll save working on new ones for another time...

The concept behind this one was fairly simple. 'Life of Death' was based on the book 'The Book Thief' so I went with the idea of a book opening, with a sort of mystical text revealing itself, and then the book closes. The time between the prologue and first scene didn't leave a huge amount of room for anything complex, so this is quite short. I like this title.

Technical notes: Made entirely in After Effects, using some very nice textures, ink bleed footage and tutorials that I bought.




A more final version of the 'My Llanelli' title, with a more 3-dimensional text effect, and I've sped up the footage so the clouds move a bit quicker and it looks less like a still image. I much prefer this to the original version.

Technical notes: Same as my previous post, shot with Dai's JVC cam, made in After Effects. This one's a lot more polished than the work in progress, which you can really notice when you see the full size clip. It's not so noticeable on this resolution, but I know the cloning and the colour correction is there...




I was experimenting with different effects on top of the above 'My Llanelli' clip, and I came up with this chalkboard style. It's not fantastic, but I thought it looked interesting, so I'm posting it up.

As always, any and all feedback on the above pieces is welcome and encouraged.

Daf