First Hippie Alien.

An illustration of one of the hippie aliens that will inhabit the campervan spaceship. I found it really difficult to transform the image of my friend into an alien without it looking too cheesy. But think the final result is pretty good. The original picture had rectangle shaped glasses but i thought John Lennon esque glassess would be more suitable.

Resident of the Space Van.

This is my first design for the resident of the spaceship. Just by altering the lengths of fingers you can very easily start to make a normal looking hippie into a funky looking alien.

This was a really simple job but looks good despite how long it took. Im going to keep playing around with illustrator and make some more hippie aliens for my spaceship.

Volkswagon Spacevan.

After sketching out many ideas for a spaceship using coke bottles and vinly players as inspiration i still had nothing i could really work with in all aspects of the module. Then I had a revelation in shape of turning a VW Camper van into a spaceship with a few funky modifications. So I drew out what i thought it would look like:

VWS Van

How i came up with this is i simply imagined what a camper van would look like had it been 'Spaceshipified' and this was the result. Extend the lines flowing from the font into rear wings and remove the wheels and add bumpers with wings attached. Added a dorsal on the roof and changed the eyes to 3 on each side rather than one, to represent the Alien.

Next i wanted to bring the van to life so I took it into illustrator and used the pen tool to sketch it out. Afterwards I used live paint to come up with a variety of colour schemes.

This one is my favourite and im very sure that i will be using the wings in the final model.

red and green (obviously) Looked good at first but looks to christmassy now.

I like the red and green stripes but the red clashes to much with the blue

Another finallist for the colours i think the mix of vibrancy really embodies the van and the hippies who once
used it. 

Keying Green Screen Footage.

Learning about pulling off a clean key is a really important skill needed in the VFX module because if it is done even slightly wrong it ruins the whole illusion of the green screen.

First we imported some footage into AE first we need to so separate the actor from the background then use the screen colour ink dropper to remove the green screen.

Use a screen blur for a smoother edge (use a value of 3)

Change the black and white values to 58 for the black and 75 for the white, this will equalise the black and white for a cleaner key.

Make sure the white background is a pure white, any grey
will lessen the quality of the key.

Creating a Simple choker will also tighten up the edges of the key. Finally we need to separate the actor from the background completely. 

Actor Separated from background.

Make a Junk Matte and this will remove all unnecessary background colour. Draw a wide ring around the actor to make account for any extreme movement they might make.