I always loved shooting, editing and creating action short films, but in Australia it is very hard to film in a public place and have realistic looking gun props involved.
State officials just don’t like people waving around handguns of any sort (even the toy variety) and so I had to come up with a different solution

Given we could not use props for handguns, I thought hmmm… ‘why not use our hands as handguns’! See what I did there? … *cough*, it was a pretty lame idea but it kind of stuck in my head as something we could possibly do.

Later, the twist with the hand grenade occurred to me and so I decided to grab my friend Jimmy America and actually shoot the clip.

It was an awful amount of work to add all the muzzle flash effects for the handguns and I gave up trying to use Phoenix FD in 3Ds Max for the final explosion and settled for a (well composed) 2D explosion effect.

I still wish we had shot it on a cloudy day so it would have been easier to give the entire short film a bit of a darker look overall and to give the flashes from the handguns and the hand grenade a little bit more impact, but sometimes you just have to work with what you got

And once I composed the music and added the sound effects, it all kind of came together quite nicely

I’ve been working on a special Easter video and have managed to complete it just on time. Watch Walter and his evil twin ‘celebrate’ Easter together

I have always been a fan of antagonistic duos like Tom and Jerry, Road Runner and Wile E coyote or – more contemporary – Itchy & Scratchy. No words are necessary; the entire story is told with nothing but gestures, scenes and music so the viewer can enjoy the movie no matter what language they may speak

It took me a long time to edit this video and I am still not sure whether the storyline will be clear to someone watching without knowing what is going on. It’s sometimes hard to disassociate yourself from your own story and try to see it with ‘fresh’ eyes.

I also have to find an easier way to record the sound. None of the sound you hear in this Easter short film is real – it is all recorded and overlayed in post production. But since this is a very slow process I think I have to rethink how I can record the sound cleanly directly when filming

Either way, I am very happy with this video and I hope you will enjoy watching it!

Have a Happy Easter!

Me and my friends were equally tempted by the physical challenge, the camaraderie and the pure dirty adventure, so when the first Australian Tough Mudder event was announced to be on Phillip Island near Melbourne, we decided to give it a shot.

After watching a few videos from the US, everyone ramped up their training in anticipation of an endless, gruelling and painful track. Especially Electroshock Therapy looked absolutely insane with people screaming their heads off and dropping like rocks into the mud after getting zapped! Have a look at this crazy one:

Why we didn’t change our minds after seeing that video is beyond me. I think we just wanted to see how far we could push ourselves and on Saturday the 31st of March, Tough Mudder was finally upon us.

15,000 people were scheduled to participate in Tough Mudder on that day and we drove down to Phillip Island to get there 2 hours early for our 2pm start time. 600 people starting every 15 minutes from 8am to 2pm onwards. You do the math! It was a LOT of people

The organisation of the event was amazing! Parking was quick, easy and well instructed. Registration was broken up by last name so we were done in 5 minutes. Within 30 minutes of arriving we were all ready to go with our numbers pinned to our clothes and went “now what?”

Left to right: Luke, Dave, Emma, Me, Tim, Franco

We had some food, listened to some of the live music and watched people run through Electroshock Therapy. Surprisingly less people were screaming at the Electroshock Therapy obstacle than at Arctic Enema, a big tub filled with ice and water to dive through. The most feared obstacle didn’t seem so bad any more.

At 1:40 we were done waiting and simply joined the next start group. No one checked that we were part of our designated group and so, at 1:45, after taking a very corny Tough Mudder pledge, we were on our way.

A lot of the Tough Mudder obstacles were not much of a challenge and simply more dirty fun than anything.
Most of the Berlin walls except for the last set were fairly low and had steps to boost yourself over, the barbed wire on Kiss of Mud was actually all blunted, Boa Constrictor did only have a few centimetres of water in the pipes (rather than being up to your neck), Fire Walker was a walk through a short stretch of smoldering hay and many other obstalces turned out a lot less scary than we expected.

Most of them were simply great fun. We did Walk the plant to jump 4-5m into water, trudged, pulled, rolled, crawled and pushed our way through a variety of sticky mud pits, up and down slippery dirt slopes, through water obstacles and across ropes and monkey bars.

For me, the killer was the running.
We were up to about Kilometer 5 or 6 when my knee started to hurt
I am not a strong runner, mainly because my knee seems to loathe the mere thought of running. My dad (a doctor who loves running marathons… cazy man!) told me I have a short tractus iliotibialis (band running from hip to side of knee) that heats up when I run and gets incredibly painful. I’ve been training and stretching for 3 months, but I can’t seem to get it fully under control. I knew it would act up during Tough Mudder, but I had hoped it would take a little longer than 6km.

I started to walk or powerwalk for short distances to give my knee a break. My team mates slowed down a little so I could keep up with them, but as the kilometres went by I got slower and slower. By kilometre 10, I was more walking than running, kilometre 13 was when walking started to hurt and by kilometre 15 or so I was limping along slower than most people would walk. Every step was like a hammer to my knee, but I was determined to finish the Tough Mudder challenge.

Towards the end of the Tough Mudder course however, we paid the price for not being in the 8am start group as the track filled up with people. Moreover, the weather changed and the sun vanished. A cold sea breeze was coming up onto Phillip Island and we were getting increasingly cold as we made our way towards the finish line caked in wet mud.

We had a volunteer tell us to climb out of a waist deep water filled trench to avoid sitting in the queue for Twinkle Toes for another 15 minutes. So we got up and ran along the muddy bank instead. I think this was around kilometre 14 so my knee was hurting like hell and I am glad I still managed to keep my balanace and not drop into the mudpit below. After Twinkle Toes my method of movement deteriorated to a limp and the rest of my team started to move ahead of me. I didn’t mind. I didn’t really want to hold them all back anyways

I was getting frustrated with my painful knee, but many people who passed me encouraged me to keep going
However as the kilometres went by, I started to get very, very cold though simply because I was no longer running and the sun was gone. But with ‘only’ a few kilometres to go, I didn’t want to give up.

After Funky Monkey (where I slipped almost instantly because my gloves and the rugs were all slimy with mud), a tire mountain, a few more mud pits and the Turd’s Nest, I could see a crowd appearing in the distance. As I limped closer, I could see it was a large number of spectators and Tough Mudder participants waiting in front of the second last obstacle: Everst, a half pipe covered in mud that you need to run up and somehow reach the top.

Besides a large number of spectators there was also a humongous crowd of Tough Mudders waiting to attempt Everest. Cold, shivering and wrapped in thermo sheets we stood there a while but when word got around that it might be a wait of up to 1 hour, we decided to skip Everest and go straight through to Electroshock Therapy.

Electroshock Therapy was not nearly as bad as I had feared. Limping a bit behind I went through the wires after all my team mates had already gone through. A friendly volunteer had a hose with water aimed at me the entire stretch through Electroshock therapy so I probably got a few extra shocks, but besides some pinching and some muscle twitching I made it through within maybe 10 seconds

I believe that the level of voltage for Tough Mudder in Australia may have been a lot lower than it is in America simply due to health and safety regulations – for which I am very grateful I didn’t really want to flop and collapse face down into the mud after being zapped!

Straight after Electroshock Therapy we got a group shot taken by the Tough Mudder camera crew and I will post it up once I get my hands on it
Then, 3.5h after starting Tough Mudder, we went through the finish line to receive our headbands, T-shirts and free beer

All of us except Franco skipped the shower at the end simply because the lines were too long, but the shower I had in the hotel afterwards was probably one of the nicest I’ve had in my life

Left to right: Emma, Luke, Dave, Me, Tim (Franco went to shower)

Tough Mudder was great fun and even if you’re not overly fit I am sure you can make it
Don’t get me wrong, there were some nasty obstacles in there. When I jumped into the ice and water of Arctic Enema, my whole body went numb. After diving under the board and pulling myself out the other end I felt 10kg heavier because I was soaked with freezing water. We were lucky that it was a fairly mild day.

But the only thing that posed a real challenge to me was my painful knee. My team mates however did not have much trouble finishing the 20km and the 25 obstacles.

Maybe we will all do it all over again next year if Tough Mudder returns to Melbourne

In this tutorial, besides watching Walter and The Devil fight it out, you will learn all about the concepts and the practical application of Motion Tracking!
Enjoy!

Motion Tracking Fundamentals

Motion tracking in itself is not a visual effect, but an essential tool to help you create visual effects. It allows you to track the motion of moving elements in your footage and extract information about their position, rotation and scaling.

You can then use this tracking data to control other layers in your composition and, for example, create visual effect elements and have them follow your tracked object.
This allows you to do things like have blood stains stick to walls during a moving shot, add a halo or other effect to follow your actor, erase objects from your scene and much much more.

Base Footage

If you want to do motion tracking in a scene, make sure the element you want to track stands out cleanly against the background while shooting your footage. A person dressed in black walking in front of a dark sky will likely be hard to track. You can make motion tracking easier by adding tape markers or other helpers to your actors or objects to make them easier to track.
It is MUCH easier to remove a tracking marker than it is to track an indistinct object!

For this tutorial, we are going to track Walter’s head as he walks through the shot and attach a halo to it

After Effects Motion Tracker Controls

To get started with motion tracking in After Effects, open the Tracker window by going to
Window -> Tracker.
A small tool window containing all the controls necessary for tracking your footage will appear on the screen.

Scroll to a time position in your clip where Walter’s head is fully in frame, make sure the footage layer is selected and click on the ‘Track Motion’ button in the Tracker window. Since we also want to track the rotation of Walter’s head, make sure the ‘Rotation’ checkbox is ticked. You should now see 2 track points overlayed onto your footage, connected by a white line.

Motion Track Points

If you zoom into your track points, you will notice that each of them consists of 2 rectangles!

The inner rectangle defines the part of the frame we want to track. Make sure you position it on a very distinct and high contrast element that is easy to follow visually from frame to frame.

The outer rectangle defines the area that will be searched each frame to locate the contents defined by the inner one. Make sure it is big enough so that the element you are tracking remains within its borders across consecutive frames.

Notice that the larger you make the rectangles, the more processing After Effects will have to do and the slower the motion tracking calculations will become. Also note the small arrows on the white line connecting the 2 track points.
Track Point 1 will define the position data we are recording and Track Point 2 is used to record the angle i relation to Track Point 1 and store it as a rotation value.

Null Objects

Before we get started with the motion tracking, we need a place to store our tracking data. For this, a Null Object will be perfect. You can create a new Null Object by selecting
Layer -> New -> Null Object.
I called my layer ‘HeadTrack’ as we’ll be tracking Walter’s head

A Null Object is merely a placeholder object with a transform that contains position, rotation and scale data. You can animate these properties or add other custom properties to the Null Object and then use the Null to control other layers in your composition. A Null Object will never be rendered.

We will use the Null Object to store our position and rotation data from motion tracking Walter’s head.

Tracking The Footage

Position the track points on the element you want to track. For me, I will place them on the back of Walter’s head and on his hairline as I want to track the position and the rotation of his head.
Once you positioned your track points, you can start the motion tracking process by clicking on the ‘Analyze Forward’ button in the Tracker tool window.

After Effects will now, frame by frame, process your footage and try to keep track of the elements you specified with the track points. If at any point in time the track points fail to follow what you expected them to, you can stop this process, go back, reposition the track points and continue the process from where you left of

Sometimes you have to fix a few small things manually or help the motion tracking process along, but eventually you should end up with having your track points follow the object you are tracking nicely.

Apply Motion Tracking to Null Object

Now that we have the track points follow Walter’s head, we can apply the motion tracking data (position and rotation) to our HeadTrack Null Object. For this, click on ‘Edit Target’ in the Tracker tool window and select the HeadTrack layer. Then click on ‘Apply’, select ‘X and Y’ and click OK.

Now when you scroll through your clip, you should see the Null Object follow Walter’s head correctly through the shot
You may have to manually fix up parts of the track, for example, where your actor enters or exists the frame. I fixed up the track for the HeadTrack Null Object manually.

Parenting The Effect Layer To The Null Object

Finally, I’ve created a nice glowing halo effect that we will now attach to Walter’s head
Go to any frame in the footage and position the halo nicely over Walter’s head.

We now want to parent the halo layer to the Null Object layer. You can do this by selecting the pick whip in the ‘Parent’ column for the Halo layer and dragging it onto the HeadTrack Null Object. This will make the HeadTrack layer the parent of the Halo layer.

Now, every change in position, rotation and scaling that occurs on the HeadTrack layer will automatically be applied to the Halo layer. Since we used motion tracking to make our HeadTrack Null Object follow Walter’s head nicely during the clip, so will our Halo layer

The Result

You can add more effect layers and have them follow Walter’s head by parenting them to the HeadTrack Null Object. I added a nice glow for the halo to make it look a little more convincing

You can use motion tracking to trace the movement of any element in your footage (as long as they have distinct features you can track), store the data in a Null Object and then use the Null Object to attach effect layers or control all sorts of other effects with it

Motion tracking is a fundamental part of knowledge for any visual effects artist and I am sure you will have lots of fun with it!

I already covered how to create great gun fire (muzzle flash) effects as well as how to create realistic looking bullet hit effects.

However, I did not talk much about how to create great destruction effects. This video applies not only to bullet hits but should prove useful for any sort of damage effect you are trying to create

The basic principle of destructive visual effects

I like the psychology of this effect as it kind of works in reverse
Rather than adding a visual effect to make an object appear broken, we shoot the scene with the object already broken and then use visual effects to cover up the damage until it is destroyed.

The great thing about this is that you can interact with the broken element properly!
Imagine a scene where a wall is hit by a mortar, leaving a massive hole in it and then one of your actors crawls through that hole. For the effect, you simply cover up the hole using VFX and reveal it in a wake of rubble and dust when the mortar strikes

Step 1: Film your footage

Shoot your scene with the already destroyed element in it. For my tutorial clip, I pre-tore up a paper target and filmed the scene of me pretending to shoot at it with my fingers.

Step 2: Prepare material to cover up the damage

When you use VFX to cover up the damage, you will need something to cover up the damage with.
In my case I filmed a few small clips of me standing in the same position holding up an intact paper target.
You can then use your additional footage to cut out the element you need to cover up your broken element. In my case, I masked out a mint condition version of the paper target

Overlay the materials to cover up the damage

This can be a little tedious as you will have to align your overlay with the original footage up to the point where the element is destroyed. I used a corner pin effect and keyframing to align my paper target overlay with the broken target until I throw it into the air.

However, at the moment where I lift the target up into the air to shoot at it with my fingers, I could no longer use my overlay due to the position of the paper. During the last second before I shoot at the target, the three holes were visible from the front as well as the back.
To solve this, I created smaller overlays from parts of the intact target footage to cover up the holes individually.

I had to add some animated colorisation effects to them so the patches would blend in with the shadows on the paper

Once you have the damage covered up, you want to disable all of the VFX when the element is destroyed. For me, I remove all paper overlays when I pretend to shoot at the paper target.

Add action VFX during the transition

To make this effect less obvious, add some explosion, dust, rubble, particle or other destruction effect at the moment of impact/destruction This will make your effect more interesting as well as distract from the cover up VFX elements disapperaing.

Gun effect destruction complete

Each situation will be slightly different and you may need to prepare different cover up VFX material, apply different effects to your overlay elements and add a variety of destruction effects to make it look convincing.

However, the principle is always the same:

• Film with destroyed element
• Cover up element with VFX to point of destruction
• Add destruction effects and remove cover up effects

Have fun experimenting!

One of my videos, At War With Your TV, got featured on Indy Mogul’s Movie Quest YouTube series

They seem to have changed the format and only introduce the first clip of the playlist (which isn’t mine) rather than each one, but I still happy to see it plugged by another YouTuber

I am sure I will submit a few more videos to Indy Mogul, especially since the next few in the pipeline are actual short films rather than VFX tutorials. Would be great to get a few more of my videos featured on other people’s channels

I hope you enjoy this tutorial

The Preparation – The Overlay Layer

One of the most frustrating things about creating visual effects for bullet hits is to ensure all the blood/debris/sparks appear behind your actors or objects in the scene. Imagine masking them out frame by frame and then you decide to move them or replace them with different footage. You end up having to go through the whole frame by frame masking nightmare again
To avoid this, I have decided to go another way and it has worked out pretty well so far

Instead of masking out the elements to sit behind my actors or objects, I rotoscope out the actors or objects and create an overlay layer. I then place all blood/spark/debris effects on top of my base footage layer without masking and then place the overlay layer on top of that. Instantly, all bullet hit effects appear to be sitting behind the elements in the overlay layer
And the best thing about this solution: it’s flexible! I can move or replace all bullet hit elements without any extra work required.

Starting with the base footage, we first rotoscope out our actor for the duration of the bullet hit to create the overlay layer. In After Effects CS5 and up, I highly recommend using the rotobrush tool to help you with this task as it can be a little tedious. The rotobrush tool is not perfect, but it does make your job a lot easier
Be sure to enable the ‘refine matte’ option on the rotobrush effect, it will make the edges of your overlay look cleaner.

Because the rotobrush effect is really slow to render, we render out our overlay layer. To maintain the transparency of the video, I usually export as AVI and set the output channels to RGB+Alpha.

Once we’ve done that, we can reimport the clip into your scene and place it on top of your base footage. Don’t forget to disable the rotobrush effect on your base footage as we no longer need it. I usually don’t like to delete it just in case I need to make adjustments and re-export the overlay

The Bullet Hit

Now that we have the overlay layer created, we can add some blood splatters for the bullet hit onto the wall behind the actor. Simply take a blood splatter elment and place it above the base footage but under the overlay layer. Without any extra work the blood appears to be sitting behind our actor

Next, take an image of a bullet hole or a damaged plaster wall and place it over the blood effect layer. Scale it and position it right over the centre of the blood. You may have to add a curves adjustment to ensure the lighting is correct and the bullet hole fits into the scene. Again, notice that no masking is required.

One important thing for the bullet hit is the blood mist cloud. When a bullet hits a person, the impact usually creates a small explosive cloud of blood mist due to the force of the impact. To simulate this effect, we add a smoke or dust element on top of the overlay layer. We then colour the layer red.
In After Effects, you can do this by applying the Colorama effect. Leave the input as ‘Intensity’ and select ‘Red Ramp’ for the output. If your effect appears to be almost solid red, it is because Colorama is overwriting the alpha channel. To fix this, expand the ‘Modify’ tab and untick the ‘Modify Alpha’ checkbox.

I usually like to make the blood a bit darker so it looks a bit more realistic, but feel free to tweak it as you like. Make sure the blood mist cloud shoots out at the moment of bullet impact and fades out after about 1-2 seconds.

Lastly, we can add some debris from the wall to complete the bullet hit. If a bullet was to pierce the shoulder of our actor and hit the wall behind, it would likely cause some plaster fragments to fly around. You can either create a particle effect for this or simply use some wall debris stock footage
I prefer to opt for the latter if possible simply because it saves time and with a bit of curves adjustment you can make it sit nicely in the scene!

Since the bullet hit is a very fast effect and some of the fragments would fly over our actor, I prefer to place the fragments on top of the scene.

Finally, you can add some curves and saturation effects to the bullet his scene a nice ‘film look’

Note that the layers you need for a great looking bullet hit effect will depend on what (or who) your bullets are colliding with. But I higly recommend using an overlay layer as outlined above – it will save you a hell of a lot of time, render faster and allow you to experiment around more easily until you are satisfied with your bullet hit

Compositing the layers for a realistic muzzle flash

To create this effect, you will have to composite a number of layers. Of course, these are not hard set rules so experiment if something doesn’t seem to fit right – to me, that is always the most fun part anyways

The first thing I add is the actual muzzle flash effect. I really love the Action Esssentials 2 package from VideoCopilot and for $99 for the 720p version, I highly recommend it. It’s filled with pre keyed stock footage and I use it almost daily. However, you can also find free action stock footage just by searching on google
Here’s a useful link to free stock footage from detonation films.

Anyways, take and position a muzzle flash element on top of your base footage.

Next, add another solid colour layer to simulate the light emitting from the muzzle flash. Set it to a colour that is very similar to the muzzle flash and change the blend mode to additive. I usually set the opacity to around 20.

Just putting a solid layer over everything does look pretty crappy. If there was a real muzzle flash in the scene, only the elements facing the front of the gun would be lit. We can simulate this by applying some masks and cutting out only the areas that would directly be hit by the light.

Once you’re done, your shot should look something like this:

It’s not bad, but I personally find that using a simple overlay layer to simulate the muzzle flash light sits very unnaturally on top of our footage rather than in the scene. We can make this look a lot more natural with a technique I described in my After Effects – Natural Lighting VFX Using Mattes tutorial: by creating a matte layer.

You can do this in most compositing software packages, but I will talk here in terms of After Effects to keep things simple.
Duplicate the base footage layer and drag it above the light layer. Add a saturation effect and bring the saturation down to 0 so you end up with black and white footage. Then, add a brightness/contrast adjustment and increase the contrast. The idea is that the bright areas of this matte layer will essentially define the opacity of our light layer. Where the matte is brighter, the light layer will be more opaque, where the matte is darker, the light layer is more transparent.
Finally, add a blur effect to soften the matte a little bit.

Now go to the ‘track matte’ option for your light layer and set it to ‘luma’. This tells After Effects that the opacity for this layer is defined by the brightness of the layer directly above, which is our matte layer. And voila, the light from the muzzle flash sits a lot more natural in the scene.

I know, I know, it’s not ‘realistic’, but the whole point of the matte is simply to glue the light and the footage together and make the light be dependent on what’s in the scene. By doing this, you tie the layers together and it won’t look like you simply stuck one layer on top of the other

Finally, you can add some curves adjustments to the entire footage, colorise it, filter it, whatever you like to give your muzzle flash shot that nice ‘film look’

Following these 6 simple steps will usually result in great looking muzzle flash effects, but sometimes the situation might call for something different. Never, ever be afraid to deviate from the ‘fixed rules’ and experiment

Another important thing that, as a film maker, you should know is pixel aspect ratio. Sometimes when you export your video, it may appear stretched or squashed because your pixel aspect ratio is incorrect.

Hopefully this week’s video will be able to clarify these things

Progressive vs Interlaced Video Mode

All film consists of a sequence of images that is (usually) played back at at least 24 frames per second. In digital video, each frame is a grid of pixels and with each new frame, the pixels on your display are updated with new colour values. However, depending on what video mode you are using, not all pixels may be updated with each new frame.

This is where progressive and interlaced video differ.

In progressive video, all pixels on your screen are updated with each new frame. This ensures smooth animation, but requires more data to be stored (and thus bigger file sizes) for each frame of video.

In interlaced video, each frame only updated every other row of pixels, alternating between the odd and the even rows. This means that it takes 2 frames for all pixels on your screen to be updated and, because less data needs to be saved for every frame, leads to smaller file sizes.
However, it does lead to very ugly video artefacts, especially around the border of moving objects

If an object is moving through the frame very fast, it will be at very different positions in consecutive frames. However, because interlaced video only stores every other row of pixels, when played back, strong horizontal lines can be seen where the object has moved.

I highly recommend to avoid interlaced video wherever possible. It is not always easy to de-interlace your video and it will save you a lot of headache to ensure your camera/display supports progressive video

Pixel Aspect Ratio

On your computer screen, all pixels are square. However, when it comes to video cameras, film and broadcasting standards, not all pixels are created equal. Sometimes pixels are more wide than they are tall. The relationship between the width and the height of the pixel is referred to as the pixel aspect ratio

Why should you care about pixel aspect ratio?

If you are a film maker or have recorded some video with a DSLR camera or a camcorder you may have encountered the problem of you video appearing stretched or squashed when you load it into your post production software or display it on a tv screen.
The most common reason for video to appear stretched or squashed is that the pixel aspect ratio used during displaying the video does not match the pixel aspect ratio that was used to record the video.

Assume you have a video recorded with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.333 (many camcorders record at 1440×1080 with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.333).
Your video comes out of the camera like this:

Now if you display this video on a display or in your post production software using a square pixel aspect ratio (1), then the video will appear squashed:

Conversely, if you recorded a video at a square pixel aspect ratio, your video would come out of your camera like this:

If you displayed this video using a pixel aspect ratio of 1.333, the footage would actually appear stretched.

If your video appears stretched or squashed, check that your pixel aspect ratio setting matches the pixel aspect ratio of the camera you used to record your footage

Happy Valentine’s Day!

There were two parts to creating this Valentine’s Day music video:

1. Composing the barber shop style love song
2. Filming and syncing the trash bin lids to the voices

Composing the Valentine’s Day love song

I have never tried to compose an a-capella piece, but once I had the melody line and the chords down it was actually not too difficult
I ended up having the bass and the baritone (leftmost 2 trash bins) sing over the base notes from the chords while only the tenor carried the melody notes.

To add a bit of variation and make it sound a little more interesting, the bass and baritone only follow the main vocals half the verse and then break out into longer, more background style vocals. This also helps make the chorus line stand out cleanly against them

During the chorus I added a choir group containing a bass, a tenor and one soprano voice (sung I head voice).

I have to admit that I ended up using a fair bit of auto tune as I’m not a terribly great singer and the tenor voice of Willis is pitch shifted up by 4 semitones because I could not sing high enough But I am pretty happy with the results and the feel of this Valentine’s Day song.

Shooting and syncing the trash bins

Once I had the music for the Valentine’s Day song, I had to combine it with the footage.

The right 4 bins in the video are all the same actual trash bin, duplicated with the basic cloning visual effect.

I attached a fishing line to each of the bins separately and filmed the lid moving up and down once. In post production I had to edit out some of the parts whe the fishing line, because it was sometimes clearly visible in the direct sunlight.

The stage of synchronizing the lid movements with the audio is probably where I spent the most time.
I placed the footage in After Effects, duplicated the trash bins with the cloning effect and enabled time remapping on them. With the music added, I then matched up the opening of the lids with the volume of the individual voices. For this, I used a little trick.

I used Motion Sketch to record my mouse movement on a Null object and linked the time positon of the trash bin to the x coordinate of the Null. When the Null was on the left side of the screen, the lid would be closed, if it was on the right side of the screen, the lid would be fully opened. I then played back the track and, with my mouse, recorded the lid movement to match up with the audio.
I repeated this for all trash bins

Finally, I added some colorisation and a little bit of story around the Valentine’s Day love song to wrap it all a little better

Have a happy Valentine’s Day

To not let all my failed attempts go to waste, I decided to create a video tutorial on the most common green mistakes and how you can avoid them!

Here is a quick summary of the 5 most common green screen mistakes and some tips on how to avoid or fix them

1. Shadows on the Green Screen

The Problem

If your subject is too close to the green screen or the light from the front is too strong, a dark shadow might be cast onto your green screen.

This can cause unpleasant artefacts when you finally try to apply the chroma key. Because the dark areas on the green screen are too close in colour to the dark areas of your subject it may be hard to key them out cleanly.
On the right side it’s hard to tell where the arm ends and the shadow on the green scren begins.

The Solution

Position your subject a little bit at a distance to the green screen to reduce the shadows.
Try to avoid a single hard light on your subject which will cause strong shadows.
Add lights behind your subject that are aimed at the green screen to brighten up the dark areas.

2. Unevenly lit Green Screen

The Problem

This problem is very similar to the previous one. While the green screen is now better lit, the lighting is very uneven, creating dark and bright areas in the background.

Again, this can make the application of the chroma key difficult without clipping away parts of your subject. Here is an image of what the unmodified screen matte looks like.

The Solution

Sometimes you can rectify the solution in post by carefully controlling the ‘deposit black’ and ‘deposit white’ parameters in your Keylight Effect (if in After Effects). Other compositing software chroma key effects will have similar options, so try this first
To prevent getting into this situation to begin wtih, try to add lights aimed at your green screen to even out the lighting before you shoot.

3. Motion blur in front of Green Screen

The Problem

If you shoot at a slow shutter angle, you may end up with motion blur in front of the green screen.

This is something that is really hard to fix in post production since the areas where the motion blur occurred will be blended together with the green screen. It can be hard or even impossible to set up a clean chroma key without losing parts of your subject.

The Solution

Try to have your subject move slowly to avoid motion blur to begin with.
If you need fast movement, use a higher shutter speed (a smaller shutter angle) to avoid motion blur. Because this will impose a certain hypersensitive onto your footage, you can add the motion blur back in post production – AFTER you applied the green screen

4. Clipping out of the Green Screen

The Problem

You shot in front of your green screen and the subject was out of the screen for just a short moment. Not a problem, right? Fix it in post?

This can be very annoying to fix as you will have to manually rotoscope out all the elements that left the green screen.

The Solution

While the rotobrush tool in After Effects may help make the job easier, I strongly recommend reshooting the footage if you can

5. No backlight

The Problem

This is not really a problem, more a tip on how to make your subject stand out a little cleaner against the green screen. This will make application of the chroma key a lot easier and it will help give the actor or object a bit more shape by lighting them smartly

If you just shoot your subject against a green screen with light from the front, the outline of the subject is not very well defined.

The Solution

Add a light between the green screen and your subject but aim it towards the camera at the back of your subject. This will create a nice highlight outline around your subject and give it shape and make it stand out nicely against the background

I hope these tips will be helpful when you’re doing your next green screen shoot! I certainly learnt them the hard way hehe

I don’t consider myself an expert and I often learn tons of new things myself when I’m creating these tutorials, but today I have a very simple visual effect tutorial for all of you: how to create a clone!

Tips & Tricks

It’s easy to create clones of yourself as long as you do not overlap or interact with yourself, but what if you want to? What if you want to hand a package from one clone to the next or have an army of them come up and gather around a table where there is not enough space for all of them to stand side by side? In this case, you have to be a bit smarter about your visual effect!

Overlapping with yourself
Green screening will allow you to (fairly) easily overlap yourself with your clones without having to manually rotoscope them. By using a green screen you end up with footage of your clone on a transparent background and it will be easy to place them in the scene. Incidentally, my next YouTube tutorial will be on green screening hehe

Interacting with yourself
This is a tricky one and you will most likely need another person for this. Let’s say you want to hand a package from one clone to the other. As clone 1, act out the scene until the moment you pass on the package. Have someone else take the package from you and pretend to be your clone. Then, have that person pretend to be clone 1 while you act out the part of clone 2, who is receiving the package.
The difficult part will be to ensure the package is in the same position/angle when you hand it over to your clone so you can cut together the footage without any obvious cuts. It is tricky but can be done, I have often seen CG employed as well to ‘smooth’ over the moment of interaction.

Either way, I hope you have fun with the cloning visual effect! There is a lot of great things you can do with it and you sometimes never know whether something will work until you try it!

I must have spent about 3 weeks purely doing post production on this short film as virtually every scene contains some sort of visual effect. It was a bit daunting, but also great fun and a great learning experience to delve into compositing 3d rendered elements with real footage and I can’t wait to do more elaborate visual effects in future video projects.

I am quite happy with the results and hope you will enjoy this short film

I am always happy to receive any feedback for my video projects, so feel free to leave some in the comments below. If I get around to it, I might go over a few of the visual effects and talk about how they were created in some tutorial videos

Fairly quickly, you will need to make some sort of post production plan.

No, don’t run away! You don’t need to go to write documents, work to a schedule or – god forbid – talk to people, but you should think about the effects you want to create, what is required to achieve those effects and how you can break up your post production into individual steps.

For me, those steps usually include:

1. Clean and edit footage
2. Create basic effect
3. Rotoscope and render required overlay elements
4. Add overlays, finalize effect
5. Colorisation and VFX lighting

Let’s have a look at how those steps apply to achieve this fairly simple bullet hit effect:

Post Production Step 1: Clean and edit footage

As a first step into post production, you want to delete any footage files you do not need and create an initial rough edit. Here you want to start thinking about where and how your effects will fit – however do not add them at this stage!

You want to add visual effects only to the final edit of your footage. There is nothing more frustrating than to spend hours on a visual effect only to realize that the footage you used does not fit into your final video project.

For my bullet hit effect I have a (final edit of a) scene of me sitting on the couch, pretending to be hit by a bullet.

Post Production Step 2: Create basic effect

At this stage I want to setup a rough version of the effect so I can easily alter it without spending much time on it.

I add the blood splatter effect, turn it into a 3D layer and position it in the scene to sit on the wall directly behind my head, in line with the bullet’s trajectory. At this stage I don’t care that the effect it’s sitting over my arm and head.

I used stock footage from the Videocopilot Action Essentials 2 collection.
And no, I’m not sponsored by them (I wish!), but think the package is very worth the money

Post Production Step 3: Rotoscope and render required overlay elements

Many effects will require you to place an effect behind an element in your scene. Since your footage is just a series of flat 2D images you will have to cut out or mask out those elements in post production so that you can place them on top of the effect.

For this you have two options:

• Using masks
• Rotoscoping

Masks are usually sufficient for short and simple elements, but if you have a person moving in front of your explosion or, as in this case, blood splatter, you will most likely require to use rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping is the process of outlining a certain element in your scene frame-by-frame. The outline is then used to cut out the element so it can be placed over other objects.
Remember to always rotoscope in full resolution or your rotoscoping mask may look totally different when you do your final export.

In After Effects, one trick you can do to speed up the rotoscoping process is to first apply a mask to your footage to cut out the area you’re interested in. This reduces calculation time as only your masked area will be considered when you step through your frames one at a time.

I draw a mask around the area containing my head and my arm:

Once the mask is applied most of the image will be discarded:

I then step through the footage for those frames where I need the blood effect to be hidden behind my arm and head and rotoscope them. After Effects will display the outline of the rotoscoped element in pink.

Rotoscoped footage (especially in 1080p) is really slow to preview in After Effects. What you want to do once you’re done rotoscoping is to export only the cut out element in a separate video. You can then import that video and use it instead of your original footage with the rotoscoping effect applied.
This is a very important task as it will speed up the rest of your post production by a big factor!

Here is a frame from the rotoscoped video I exported:

Post Production Step 4: Add overlays, finalise effect

Now I can place the video of my arm and head on top of the blood effect to make it look like the blood sits behind me on the wall. I added the white outline so you can see where the rotoscoped footage sits in the final scene. Notice how the blood is now hidden behind those elements.

Without the outline it looks as we expect

At this stage in the post production, I usually also do some tweaking like making sure the effect fits nicely into the scene in terms of colour and size as well as add a few more details. Because I know the effect is almost complete I am happy to spend some time here to make it look convincing

Post Production Step 5: Colorisation and VFX lighting

Movie footage never looks like it was shot on an averagely cloudy day in your living room Instead, it usually has a certain colourised and stylised look.

In the final stages of your post production process, you want to apply full frame effects like colour curves, saturation and contrast changes as well as artificial lighting effects to your video

I want my footage to look like it has been shot at night so I reduce saturation and contrast, add colour curves and darken the entire video. I then increase the blue channel and remove a bit of red and green to give it that dark night blue.

The last thing I want to do as part of the colourisation is to simulate a TV flickering just off to the right of the frame. I have a detailed tutorial in my post on creating visual effect lighting using mattes.

Here is what my final video looks like:

Now I talked way too much (as usual), but the main thing to really keep in mind is to just take a moment to think about your post production process before you get started.
Break it up into small steps and it all be be a lot easier in the end

When you create your videos, many different situations might require you to add visual lighting effects in post production for things like gun muzzle flashes, lightning strikes, explosions, artificial light sources and more. However, many YouTube videos I’ve seen use a rather unsightly technique of placing a masked orange or white circle over the footage and setting the blending mode to additive… not a very elegant or convincing effect.

Fortunately, you do not need to put in much additional work to make your visual lighting effect look a lot more convincing. By using a simple matte layer, you can make your effect look more organic and blend much better into your footage

The Basic Effect

Here is a still frame from my visual effect video Making Fire With Your Hands:

In After Effects, I have set up 2 layers: one for the base footage called ‘Footatge Comp’ and one for the fire element called ‘Fire Comp’, placed on top and positioned and scaled so that the flame sits nicely on my thumb. The fire element is a stock footage element from the Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 collection.

Now that we have the basic footage set up, let’s add an organic lighting effect to the fire element

Create a new solid layer, name it something like ‘FireShine’ and give it an orange-yellow colour to match the colour of the flame. Using the masking tool, draw a circle on the FireShine layer and position it so that the centre of the circle is exactly over the fire. Add a fairly large amount of feathering to the mask to have the light fade off gradually.

The lighting of the candle is way too strong, so reduce the transparency of the FireShine layer down to around 35%. Change the blending mode to ‘additive’. Voila, you are done!

Ok ok… just kidding While this visual lighting effect might not look all bad, let’s make a small modifications to our fire shine to make it sit much more naturally in the scene rather than on top of it

Creating A Matte For The Fire

The biggest problem with the above approach is that the shine of the light does not interact in any way with our base footage and thus appears to be stuck on top of it. One way to improve this would be to create many small masks on the FireShine layer to light up highlighted areas like face, arms, fingers, table and other elements that would be affected in real life by a light source at that position. However, there is a much simpler way: using a matte layer for the light.

A matte is a layer that is used to define the transparency of the layer directly below it. By creating a matte based on our footage and applying it to the shine of the fire, we can tie the lighting effect and the footage together organically

Duplicate the ‘Footage Comp’ layer and place the copy above our FireShine layer. Rename the layer to ‘Light Matte’.
Notice that the new layer will hide the FireShine layer, but that is ok – we just want to be able to see the Light Matte while we make adjustments. Once we are happy with our matte, we will hide it and apply it to the FireShine layer.

We want to use the brightness of the footage to define how strongly the light shine will affect it. Bright areas will receive a lot of shine, dark areas will receive very little. Now I know that this is not how it works in reality, but we just want to blend the FireShine layer more organically into our footage. Additionally, keeping the dark areas dark will retain shadows and thus enhance the feeling of a real light source being present in the scene.

Now let’s get to adjusting our matte so we can use it

Apply a hue/saturation effect to the Light Matte and fully desaturate the image. Now, add a brightness/contrast effect and increase brightness and contrast to bring out the bright and dark areas of the footage. Since the footage is a little grainy and fire glow is usually fairly soft, I have also added a fast blur effect to the matte to smoothen it all out a little bit. These are the effects on the Light Matte layer:

Your Light Matte (with the FireComp layer still visible on top of it) should now look so something like this:

Now all that is left to do is to apply our Light Matte to the FireShine layer!
To do this, turn off the visibility of the Light Matte layer. Select your FireShine layer and set the track matte from None to Luma. ‘Luma’ means brightness and indicates that the alpha for our FireShine layer will be taken from the brightness of the layer directly above it, which is our Light Matte layer.

So wherever our Light Matte layer is black, the transparency of the FireShine layer will be 0%. Wherever the Light Matte is white, the FireShine layer will be fully opaque. Gray levels specify different levels of semi-transparency

You can quickly check how our FireShine layer looks now by settings its blending mode back to ‘Normal’. I also turned off the FireComp layer to show only the FireShine affected by the Light Matte:

Now, this more sophisticated FireShine layer can be applied to our scene by setting its blending mode to ‘additive’! The final scene looks like this:

Voila, the candle light suddenly sits a lot more organically on your footage as the affected areas are literally defined by the footage While this may not be the most realistic way, it is fast and easy to do and does look a whole lot better than simply ‘adding’ a light layer over your shot!

Happy lighting!

One thing I have always wanted to do since watching Freddie W’s Fire Hands video is to make my own video of me creating fire with my hands.

Now I didn’t just want to copy their idea and to be honest, I almost get the feeling the fire in Freddie’s video is real rather than a VFX, and so I came up with my own little video idea.
What do you do when the lights go out but you have no matches to light your candle? Use your hands!

I am planning on putting up a small video tutorial for this fire effect as well
Or at least cover how to make proper fire/candle/gun lighting effects and composite them more onto your footage – I seem to find too many videos where the ‘lighting’ is just a mask stuck over the footage using additive lighting.

So keep your eyes peeled for some tutorials soon

Bear Grylls is such an inspiring and positive character, it’s hard not to like him and feel motivated when watching him climb, swim, crawl and eat his way through some of the toughest terrain on this planet.

For me, I have always loved adventure but had gotten a bit stuck in work and everyday routine. It was watching Man vs Wild that reignited my desire to be out in the wilderness, go climbing and exploring and enjoy the beauty this world has to offer

In honour of Bear Grylls, I always wanted to make a Man vs Wild spoof video – not with mocking, evil intent, but instead as a hommage to his undefeatable spirit and his endless enthusiasm for the wild

A few weeks ago, I went on a hike with my friend Alex and decided it was time to shoot the footage needed to make my Man vs Not So Wild video!

I hope you will enjoy it

The video was shot up in the Dandenong Ranges just east of Melbourne, Australia.
We shot most of the footage just off the main hiking tracks with the camera aimed into the rainforest to give a feeling of actually being surrounded by it. Before I got to sound editing, I wasn’t too sure the illusion would work as there were plenty of moments when you could hear cars, people talking and even a helicopter flying by

Lots of things went wrong during the shooting and just for the fun of it I made a small outtakes video. If you want to see a bit behind the scenes footage and have a bit of a laugh at the stupid stuff we did (or tried to do) during the shooting of the actual video, here is the outtakes reel:

Thank you for all the adventures

It is a really simple, very easy to use project management tool that can be used for any sort of project to create, manage, organise and prioritise the tasks required as well as assign them to people and track their progress.

For most of the time I have been using it for small personal projects like music, website or games developement

Pidgeon Project supports rich text editing so the descriptions for all your tasks and notes can contain bold or italic text, different font sizes, bullet lists and even embedded images! Each description is saved in a separate .rtf (rich text formatting) file.

Tasks have completion percentages and you can group them together and assign them to people. The project management tool will then tell you what your overall project completion is and it will show you task lists for all people so you have an easy overview

Originally, I wrote it for simple team based software projects, so it does support any number of people working on the same project. Since it saves all items into separate files it is easy to check all files for a project into a repository and collaborate with others

There’s lots of other small goodies in this tool and best of all: it’s all free!
So head on over to the Pidgeon Project Software Page and try it out!

If you have any problems with Pidgeon Project, any suggestions or requests for additional features, please send me a message

In addition to the video I have written up the following tutorial to go into a few more details on shutter angle and why it is so important.

Common mistakes when shooting video with your DSLR

Have you ever taken a video with your DSLR and it ended up looking more like some cheap home made clip rather than high quality film? While there are a lot of steps taken in post-processing to make the footage look sleek and polished, one simple principle you can utilise right now to improve the quality of your videos is shutter angle.

When you take video with your DSLR in automatic mode two bad things will happen:

• The brightness will constantly change as the camera tries to keep your film at ‘default’ brightness. This causes the video to look very ‘home made’
• The brightness is adjusted by constantly changing the shutter speed of your camera. This behaviour is called a ‘rolling shutter’

To understand why a rolling shutter is a bad thing we need to discuss the effect shutter speed has on your video.

The effect of shutter speed on your video

The shutter speed of your camera controls how much motion blur you will see in every single frame of video footage. Unless the amount of motion blur in the video is similar to the amount we see in our every day lives, the footage will not feel natural to us. Our brain will perceive the differences and distance us from what is happening on screen

Have a look at these two images:

The falling ball in the left image has a lot more motion blur because the photo was taken with a slower shutter speed of 1/30s. The falling ball on the right side has a lot less motion blur because the shutter speed was faster at 1/100s. While this example is a photo, the effect of shutter speed on video is the same! The amount of motion blur in every single frame is controlled by your shutter speed.

A rolling shutter is bad for video because the constant change in shutter speed changes the amount of motion blur from frame to frame, creating a very inconsistent feel

Most of the time, we are used to seeing a certain amount of motion blur with our naked eye – just try to swipe your hand in front of your face and you see what I mean. Sometimes we have ‘blurry vision’ and all movement around us seems to leave more streaks than normally. Other times we receive an adrenaline rush and suddenly everything we see and hear appears were sharp and rich in details.

By using a specific (fixed) shutter speed we can give our film a certain amount of motion blur, depending on what effect we are after:

• By using a slow shutter speed, every frame of video will have more motion blur than we naturally see and thus the footage will appear blurry and smooth
• By using a ‘normal’ shutter speed (I will discuss this below), every frame of video will have an amount of motion blur that approximates what we see every day with our eyes. This shutter speed is most frequently used in most motion pictures
• By using a fast shutter speed, every frame of video will have very little motion blur and the footage will look as if we were experiencing an adrenaline rush

Why is it called Shutter Angle?

In analog motion picture cameras the shutter is a spinning disc called a rotary disc shutter. The film is being pulled through the camera one frame at a time and the shutter rotates in front of the film to control how long each frame is exposed.

This shutter rotates at the same speed as the framerate. For 24fps, the shutter rotates 24 times a second. For 30fps, the shutter rotates 30 times a second. The shutter disc has a certain angle cut out of it and every time the cut out moves over the frame, light can reach the frame and expose it. How long each frame is exposed is determined by the angle of this cut out.

And it is this angle that is referred to as the shutter angle

At 24fps, the shutter rotates 24 times a second, each rotation taking 1/24s.
At 180° shutter angle, the shutter is basically cut in half and each frame is exposed for half the time it takes the shutter disc to do one full rotation. One full rotation takes 1/24s, so each frame is exposed for exactly half of that time, which is 1/48s.

At 30fps, the shutter rotates 30times a second, each rotation taking 1/30s.
At 180° shutter angle, each frame is exposed for half the time it takes the shutter disc to do one full rotation. One full rotation takes 1/30s, so each frame is exposed for exactly half of that time, which is 1/60s.

It is important to notice that the shutter angle describes the shutter speed in relation to the framerate. When you keep the same shutter angle but you change the frame rate, you need to adjust your shutter speed accordingly

Why 180° makes your video look like film

Typically, motion pictures are filmed at a 180° shutter angle. Lately, 90° is used a fair bit in war or horror movies to make the footage more intense and give the viewer an adrenaline rush feeling, bust most of the films you will see in the cinema use 180° because it has the motion blur that most closely approximates the motion blur we see with the naked eye.

So if you want your DSLR video to look more like film do two things:

• Set your camera to manual mode during recording. You might have to manually adjust the ISO setting or the aperture to make sure your image has the correct brightness. Yes this is more work, but believe me, it’s worth it
• Set your shutter angle to 180°: if you’re shooting at 24fps, use 1/50s shutter speed (1/48s would be more exact, but most cameras don’t have that option so 1/50s will do ). If you are shooting at 30fps use 1/60s.

Finally, here is a table summarising the framerate, shutter angle and effect most commonly used in motion pictures

I hope this tutorial was helpful to you and if you have any questions, please let me know and I will try my best to answer them and update this tutorial

I am very excited to have completed the migration from surfacedmusic to SurfacedStudio
The reason for the migration was mainly to get away from the ‘music’ part of my website. Not that I am going to stop writing music, far from it. I just love so many different creative activities and wanted to have one location where I could keep and share all of them.

Recently I have gotten more and more interested in video production and special effects. I have always been an avid photographer and as a software developer by profession I love developing video games and random small tools to make my life easier. I still love to write, compose, record and mix music, but I also want to have a place to talk about and share anything else that interests me – that place is going to be SurfacedStudio

Here is my latest video project that I did with Fables In Fashion. It’s a dark action video clip in Underworld style. I composed the music for it and added the special effects

Enjoy!

I already have a few musical drafts online that I want to eventually develop into full songs. Since I have only recently gotten my hands on a shiny new Nikon D7000 (which can also take awesome full HD movies), the current videos are sporting a simple image and text only.

The plan is to keep uploading smaller fragments regularly while working on full length songs. For the full length songs I want to create actual music videos as well – how long this process will take I am not sure yet, we shall see.
I am currently working on a song called ‘Rise Up’ which will be my first attempt at a full music + video project

There are lots of other ideas floating through my head now on what I want to put onto YouTube
I have already picked one of those ideas and want to properly film, cut and polish it – and of course I will be making the music for it too! Hopefully I will get to film all the material I need this coming weekend!

Besides getting more into video recording (and special effects – thank you After Effects!), I have mainly been working on a proper recording plan.
I have been pretty badly stuck with my music lately, ending up with hundreds of fragments and no complete songs. Trying to bust through that block, I have laid out a strict plan to follow for the next few months.

My plan schedules the release of 5 currently unfinished songs, properly composed, recorded, mixed and mastered by October. I might end up making a small video diary for the process – hopefully recording some useful information on how to get out of a rut along the way

For now, here are a few of the song drafts I have already online.
For more videos, please visit my YouTube channel.
Any feedback or suggestions are always welcome

Structure

This is probably the most basic method of maintaining a listener’s interest and all of you will probably be familiar with this even if you never actively thought about it

If all sections of your song sound exactly the same or you repeat the same melodies over and over and over, your song will fade into the background of your listeners’ attention very rapidly.
If on the other hand, your song changes to something completely new every few measures, people will be unable to follow the structure of your song and, again, lose interest.

That is why the

structure is so popular.

It strikes a good balance between introducing enough variation to remain fresh and enough repetition to create a feeling of familiarity.
Just as people’s attention starts to wane after the second chorus, a bridge or solo introduces something new before the song ends with the familiar pattern of the chorus.

Of course this is not the only song structure that works well – but I think it is probably the most commonly used. Experiment around and have a listen to your favourite songs to see what structure works for what type of songs

Emotional Intensity

Even if you have a good song structure, your song might lack emotional intensity to have much of an impact.
The chorus is the heart of your song and should convey the core of your song’s message to your listener. As the most important section it should also be the most emotionally engaging.

Have you ever noticed that when we get emotional, we raise our voices in both volume and pitch? This idea also applies to music:
we associate high pitch and volume with stronger emotions which is why in most popular songs, the chorus is louder and the vocal line is higher in pitch than in any other part of the song.

For vocals especially, since they carry the message of the song, it makes sense to have them softer during the verse and raise them in power and pitch during the chorus. In hardcore/metal music, often the verse will be shouted and the chorus will be sung.

Here are two prime examples of this concept in action

I am currently working on a song called ‘Rise Up’ and was having trouble making my chorus stand out against the verse because both sections were using similar chords and the vocals remained at about the same pitch level.
Here is what it used to sound like (the piano plays the vocal melody, sorry for the midi quality):

[audio:examples/14_05_2011_KeepingInterest/14_05_2011_Rise_Up_Segment_Flat_Emotion.mp3|titles=Rise Up - Flat Intensity]

Now that is not too bad as the patterns of all the instruments changes during the transition. The guitar strum pattern changes and both bass and drums become more lively.
However, I wanted the chorus to be more emotionally engaging and interesting and for that I had to bring the vocal line up in pitch compared to the verse.
I ended up transposing my chorus by a fourth from E minor to A minor. Have a listen to the new version:

[audio:examples/14_05_2011_KeepingInterest/14_05_2011_Rise_Up_Segment_Increased_Emotion.mp3|titles=Rise Up - Increased Intensity]

The chorus stands out more and feels more emotional in contrast to the verse – I like it much better this way

Withholding & Expectations

This section covers two different but closely related ideas:

• You can make certain sections stand out by using notes and chords that have not been used in the previous (or any other) part of your song
• You can create tension and interest by withholding chords and notes a little longer than your listeners are expecting

Assume someone tells you a about a movie they watched recently but gives away the ending too early. Kind of a let down, isn’t it? The twist of the story will be more exciting when it is not given away too early. The same applies to song composition. A chord or a note will sound more exciting if it was not used in the previous section. If your chorus kicks in with a fresh chord and the vocal line moves over notes that did not occur in the verse, it will introduce excitement into your song.

Have a listen to this small song fragment:

[audio:examples/14_05_2011_KeepingInterest/12_06_2011_Never_Falter_Bad_Vocals.mp3|titles=Never Falter - Bad Vocal Line]

The piano contrasts nicely with the verse as both the pattern and the key changes. Additionally a previously unheard chord, Ab, is introduced.
However, notice that the vocal line does not have the same impact and freshness.
The reason for this is that the first note, the C, has been preemptively “given away” in the verse and therefore does not sound surprising any more.

If we withhold the C in the verse and use it as the first note in the chorus, we can make the transition more exciting! I know there are plenty of other things we can do to improve this piece, but have a listen to how this simple change alone affects the feeling when the chorus comes in:

[audio:examples/14_05_2011_KeepingInterest/12_06_2011_Never_Falter_Good_Vocals.mp3|titles=Never Falter - Improved Vocal Line]

Another way of adding tension and interest is withholding a section of a song a little longer by using padding measures.

If we go back to our movie analogy for a moment, think of a padding measure as the scene where the hero jumps around a corner ready to shoot the bad guys, but finds himself standing alone in an empty alley. The viewer will be surprised as their expectations haven’t been met.
Of course a good movie never lets the viewer wait long until the hero runs around the next corner and the shoot out with the bad guys does actually occur.

In music, we can use padding measures to introduce that ‘empty alley’ moment to raise tension and add interest

30 Seconds To Mars use padding measures frequently to increase the tension before certain parts of their songs. Have a listen to 2:11 of Capricorn – a single 4/4 measure has been inserted just before the chorus to withhold it just a little longer from the listener and give it extra punch when it does kick in. It can almost be considered a very short pre-chorus.

Odd Time Signatures

Another way to spice up your songs is to break the stable and familiar pattern of time signature and measures.

Most songs will consist of sections which contain either 4 or 8 measures and the time signature remains constant all the way through.
Utilising odd time signature measures can work very well to create interest by introducing something different into your song.

One of my favourite songs that uses a verse containing three 4/4 measures and one 2/4 measure is Master of Puppets by Metallica. Have a listen to the verse around 0:53. Notice how the 2/4 measure breaks up the verse and emphasises the beginning of every new 4 bar measure as it falls back to the 4/4 timing.
The verse also creates a nice contrast with the chorus which uses straight 4/4 time signature measures.

When I first heard Spark by Tori Amos I had a really hard time working out what timing was being used. The odd timing together with the flowing and gentle nature of the song created something unique and intriguing. Have a listen for yourself and see if you can figure out the timing

Of course there are plenty of other ways to make your songs exciting!
This post simply summarises some of the most commonly used techniques. Have a listen to your favourite songs and I am sure you will find them used almost everywhere

Today’s riff is a fat metal riff that uses harmonic minor and palm muting to create a dense rhythmic pattern.

I decided to present you with the demo song first because

• It gives you an idea of how the riff sounds in context
• It is more fun to listen to than the dry riff

Have a listen!

[audio:examples/SundayRiff/taking_it_all_demo_09_04_2011.mp3|titles=Taking It All - Demo]

Now for the actual riff. Here are the notes including the tabulature:

The riff is based on the hard rhythmic beat of the palm muted bass notes contrasted with the brighter semitone slides.
The first 2 bars are in E harmonic minor. In the second half of the riff, the entire pattern is shifted up by to A harmonic minor, which introduces additional tension. This tension is released with a 2/4 bar at the end leading back to the beginning of the riff.

It can be a little tricky to play the semitone slides perfectly on time; I think even I’m not doing such a good job of it
Here is the plain guitar riff:

[audio:examples/SundayRiff/taking_it_all_riff_09_04_2011.mp3|titles=Taking It All - Riff]

I am currently planning out a bigger post on the importance on improvisation, but it might take me a little given the large amount of demo/backing tracks I want to include.

For now, I hope you enjoyed today’s riff!

So I’ve decided to try to do a small weekly post called ‘The Sunday Riff’.

In The Sunday Riff, I will present a small musical element I’ve come up with during the week including the recording, the notes and the tab. It might not always be an actual guitar riff; it may be a classical arpeggio, a piano melody or a drum pattern – just a small and simple piece of my music.
If there is a specific idea behind the piece, I might explain a little bit about it, but the basic idea is just to give you something to listen to and try out for yourself

I will still try to get bigger, more informative posts up, but I won’t to feel so pressed to get them up each week that I just end up getting writer’s block.

Today’s riff is an actual, simple and gritty, guitar ‘riff’.
It uses muted strings and semitone steps within the harmonic minor scale to create a dark and rugged feel.
Have a listen to the plain riff:

[audio:examples/SundayRiff/rugged_shade_of_grey_riff_03_04_2011.mp3|titles=Rugged Shade of Grey - Riff]

Here are the notes and the tab for the riff:

The riff does not sound overly exciting by itself, but when combined with a solid drum line and a bass guitar, I think it creates a nice and dark atmosphere.

[audio:examples/SundayRiff/rugged_shade_of_grey_demo_03_04_2011.mp3|titles=Rugged Shade of Grey - Concept]

I hope you enjoyed this post
There will be more to come!

Chords consist of a number of notes that are played either simultaneously or sequentially (arpeggio).
Major and minor chords are triads of notes. These triads consist of a root note, a third and a fifth. The fifth is a perfect fifth, being exactly 7 semitones higher than the root note and the third can either be 3 (minor third) or 4 (major third) semitones above the root.

E minor consists of E (root), G (minor third) and B (fifth). When you create a chord progression, let’s say Em – Am – F – G, you might be inclined to just shift your fingers to the new chord, so you would play: E,G,B – A,C,E – F,A,C – G,B,D. However, this chord progression would sound rather clumsy, because the cords do neither flow naturally into each other nor are there any variations in the feel of the chords – except the change from major to minor of course.

How can you add more colour to your chord progressions? With chord inversions

E minor consists of the 3 notes E, G and B. Now if we took the E from the bottom and placed it at the top of the chord, above the B, we would still be playing an E minor chord, but with a G in the bass. This chord is usually written as Em/G (“E minor with G in the bass”) and is the first inversion of E minor.
The second inversion is Em/B, consisting of the notes B, E and G. The following picture shows the root position, first and second inversions for the E minor and major chords:

Have a listen to both the E minor and major chords and their inversions:

[audio:examples/27_02_2011_chord_inversion/e_minor_A.mp3|titles=E minor chord inversions (Em - Em/G - Em/B)]

[audio:examples/27_02_2011_chord_inversion/e_major_A.mp3|titles=E major chord inversions (E - E/G# - E/B)]

It might be hard to tell the feel of the chords apart simply because the notes are so obviously being shifted up and each one chord sounds higher than the previous one.

I have created another example, using the exact same chord inversions, but rather than playing just the triad, I am playing the chord in the root position with the right hand and am playing a bass note with the left. For each inversion, I am only changing the bass note. This might make it easier to discern the feel the chords create:

[audio:examples/27_02_2011_chord_inversion/e_minor_B.mp3|titles=E minor chord inversions with bass note]

[audio:examples/27_02_2011_chord_inversion/e_major_B.mp3|titles=E major chord inversions with bass note]

Now while the chords consist of the same notes independent of the inversion, they feel very different. They are all conchords (rather than dischords) so they will sound harmonious, however you will notice that

• The chord in the root position sounds very solid, grounded and stable
• The first inversion adds slight tension and feels less stable
• The second inversion creates alot of tension and wants to resolve to another chord – preferrably a chord in root position.

The second inversion can work well at the end of a verse or bridge for that very reason.

Coming back to our initial chord progression Em – Am – F – G, we can make this progression sound alot more interesting by using chord inversions

By applying clever chord inversions we can
a) make the transitions less clunky by minimising the changes in notes required for each chord change and
b) add colour to the sequence by introducing some tension

One possibly way to play the chord progression would be E,G,B – E,A,C – F,A,C – G,B,D. If you play this sequence, it will sound alot more fluent than the initial, clunky version. Note that the transition from F to G is still a parallel shift of notes, which may or may not be desired.

Again, this is just one possibility. Experiment with how many variations you could come up with for this simple chord sequence and decide for yourself which one you like best!

Finally, I have created two little song fragments to demonstrate the theory of this post in the context of a composition

Both fragments make use of exactly the same chord progression: F – A – C – G – F – A – G – G (repeated). However, one of them does not make use of chord inversions, whereas the other one does.
First off, here is the composition for the version that does not employ chord inversions:

I have a bass guitar in the arrangement, but it only plays the root notes of the chords. Have a listen and you will hear the obvious shifts during the chord transitions. While not horrible, there is something unnatural and disconnected about this sequence.

[audio:examples/27_02_2011_chord_inversion/chord_inversion_demo_no_inversion.mp3|titles=Song fragment - without chord inversions]

The second version of the song fragment uses chord inversions for both minimising note changes for the piano as well as introducing colour and tension where appropriate. Here is the composition for this improved version of the song:

Now have a listen to this version of the song. The bass guitar plays the bass note as depicted in the score above, e.g. during G/B, the bass will play the B. I especially like G/B, G/d inversions at the end of the second bar and the transition back to the F.

[audio:examples/27_02_2011_chord_inversion/chord_inversion_demo_with_inversion.mp3|titles=Song fragment - with chord inversions]

Chord inversions are very simple to employ, yet they can add alot of elegance, colour and variations to your songs. Next time you create a chord sequence, experiment a little with the inversions – you will be surprised how much most progressions can still be improved