Comment by MAX on March 9, 2012 at 9:08pm

schlichtweg begeisternd: großartig! (great)

Comment by Victor Ingrassia on March 10, 2012 at 5:26am

感谢您亲切的字。(thanks)

Comment by Candice Pacheco on March 10, 2012 at 1:19pm

Really cool Victor!  Love what you did the with text paints with chinese symbols and the swimming scene is really beautiful.  Great composition.

Comment by Victor Ingrassia on March 10, 2012 at 3:41pm

Thanks Candice.

The Chinese characters are a translation of the title of the song as well as one of the lyric phrases of the song "Cheery Blossom Snow".  I made a text movie brush from jpgs I made from a font.  Some are randomly applied (like the color early sequence) some more rigid and applied along the line of a region brush. I also wanted the straight line text to be a bit twitchy as it was applied.  So I used the changing luminance of a specially made source movie to modulate the width and length of the brush.  The net effect is a non-static line of text that has energy in it. It's funny I had to make and remake the luminance source movie 4 times to get it so it would twitch the  text brush just enough but not enough to be distracting.

The swimming sequence was hard to work with.  I was using a very low quality source video... and I worked long and hard to come up with an edge quality that worked for me.  I had a lot of spurious paths flying off the edges of the figure.  Since it was taking too much time to figure out how to paint it right the first time, I simply loaded my 1st pass render into a movie layer and hand cleaned up the frames with a black brush and some cloning.  Then I took a few different incarnations of the footage and layer composited them in FCPX adding blur to some and adjusting saturation and exposure on others.  I like the way she winds up feeling like a kind angel as she flies over the bustling urban neon night scene.

~v

Comment by Michael S. Youngblood on March 11, 2012 at 10:42am

Outstanding!  Amazing what this software can do with a little creative thought behind it. 

Comment by Paul Perlow on March 18, 2012 at 8:52pm

Great piece, Victor   from start to finish!

Comment by Victor Ingrassia on March 19, 2012 at 4:38am

Thanks Paul... truly appreciated

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