Happy Hour

I loved working on this assignment because everything in the composition has been manufactured. This was an exercise in creating traveling mattes, but I decided to take the assignment a bit further. I appropriated my background from the web. The bottle was an image sequence provided by my professor. The assignment was to animate the liquid in the bottle. Starting with my style frame, I brought each of the graphical elements into Combustion and applied several applications of blend modes and mattes. Everything from the matching the color of the bottle to match the hue from the background environment to creating the reflection of the bottle onto bar surface was performed in Combustion. My goal was to integrate each of the elements in the scene into a seamless composition.

Even the bottle top was created. Working from a 3d model, I deformed the top in Maya and animated it over time.


Run time: 00:01
Frame Size: 320x240 px

Underwater Explorer

Here is my Digital Matte Painting final. For this project, I began with a basic photograph of an underwater ship wreck. I then applied a garbage matte to the guard rail in the foreground, which allowed me to extract the rail from the flat image. Next, after filling in the gaps left in the background after isolating the foreground, I imported these elements in Maya. In Maya, I was able to replicate the parallax found in the original photo; giving the environment depth and perspective in motion.

Do you thing those particles floating in the water were created in some program like After Effects, or Shake? Guess again! I created my own particle effect simply by using flour and water. It really details the murkiness of you would expect the deep sea, and gives it a more natural effect. Finally after some minimal color correction and camera movements I achieved the desired effect. The audio adds a nice touch!


Run time: 00:12
Frame Size: 384x216 px