Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters: The Musical!



As anyone who's spent more than a few minutes with me, let alone a significant period of time, will know, I'm a huge fan of Ghostbusters. It's one of my favourite films. Being a visual fx person, it was fairly inevitable I was going to attempt a proton stream from the films. A few years back, I did attempt one, and that's the video below.

I recently got thinking about it again (what with all the fuss about the video game and possible 3rd film) and thought I should be able to make a more accurate version of the stream. I played about with a few ideas, and came up with something I was quite happy with. Still not 100% accurate, but hey, I'm not ILM. It initally took longer than it should have, as I was trying to animate the co ordinates of the lens flare, the start and end of the main stream core as well as the start and end of the blue electrical forking, but then I realised all I had to do was link them up with expressions and hey presto, it all worked a lot easier.

I was looking at the stream I'd animated, and I thought maybe it needed something else. Had a brain wave that the stream slightly resembled a wavefom, and that's when I had the idea of animating the stream along to the theme for the film. After working out timings, getting the stream to work with the audio, and animating the logo (made the ghost in photoshop, and the circle in AE) complete with a bump shade to give it some depth, and the video above is the end result. It's a complete labour of love this short piece. It shouldn't have taken as long as it did to do, but things with me haven't been fantastic the past few weeks, and I've only recently had the time and energy to finish the past few days.

Technical notes: Logo partly made in Photoshop, everything else put together in After Effects. Sound fx made by the maestro that is Ken Huegel.

Proton stream original version



Like I said earlier, this is my first attempt at a proton stream. It's shot in my old old flat (which was 99% of the time a complete tip. The day of shooting was no exception) and features the wonderful acting of my own personal Bruce Campbell, Rich 'Lover Lover' Davies. We'd just started putting together Ghostbusters costumes for Halloween, and he's wearing my flightsuit and painted Real Ghostbusters toy proton pack (which is why it's so small). I don't think he was aiming for a ghost, I think he was trying to 'bust some mould that was accumulating on the wall.

Technical notes: I can't remember what we shot this on. Could've been a PD100. Proton stream made in After Effects. Sound fx again by the masterful Ken Huegel.