City rolling blackout effect?
by Darin McClaugherty
on
Apr 17, 2008 at 5:52:08 pm
Hello everyone. I am trying to create a citywide rolling blackout effect in After Effects. Has anybody tried this or could help me come up with a good way to go about it? Thanks in advance for the help!
Re: City rolling blackout effect? by Dave LaRonde on Apr 17, 2008 at 6:07:22 pm
• Get a cityscape still at night with the lights on.
• Using Photoshop OR an effect in AE (I'd try Curves first), drop the brightness of the windows until they look like the lights are off.
• Put both Lights On and Lights Off layers in a comp.
• It's then a simple matter to animate a mask.
If you change the mask shape keyframes to hold keyframes, the mask will instantly jump from one place to another. It will simulate how the lights suddenly go out in one section of town, then another, etc.
Dave LaRonde
Sr. Promotion Producer
KCRG-TV (ABC) Cedar Rapids, IA
Re: City rolling blackout effect? by david bogie on Apr 17, 2008 at 11:05:04 pm
Yar, we've done this a couple fo times. Exactly like Dave suggested on some of them. Then I got a Photoshop expert on the project. She handled it completely differently and was able to apply some magic to the original night scene so it actually looked like the lights were OUT, not just dimmed with an effect. Selling it to my audience, power company employees, required a realistic expansion of the blackout (power curtailment situation) which does NOT take place in regular grids. It follows where the lines feed, not the street layouts. And the progression is controlled by a computer so it can appear to be random but it's actually plotted by perceived needs. That is, the hospitals and critical social service buildings go last. To add to the realism, some buildings will have generators that kick in with reduced service instantly, there is no apparent switch to emergency power these days.
A blackout is sudden, it's not a fade.
The lights of automobiles stay on.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: "For crying out loud, read the freakin' manual."
Re: City rolling blackout effect? by Darin McClaugherty on Apr 18, 2008 at 1:28:52 am
Yes, I totally agree. I was hoping to leave all the lights on the cars lit on the streets and highways but my main concern is figuring out how to make them look like they have gone off and not dimmed, just like you mentioned. I'm planning to shoot downtown tomorrow night and begin to start playing with the footage so here I go. Do you happen to know what she did to make them look like they were turned off?
Re: City rolling blackout effect? by david bogie on Apr 18, 2008 at 5:18:02 pm
? Do you happen to know what she did to make them look like they were turned off?
Unfortunately, she's out of the office for several days. By the time she returns, you'll be done or will have figured it out on your own. I do know that I provided her with a wide range of exposures of the locked down scene. I had the luxury of setting up in an office building so I also shot the same scene at 0400 in the morning.
Something that might help is to shoot your scene way underexposed. Do you have any graduated ND filters? You can use the ND to block out the city so the sky stays natural.
Needlessly pedantic:
As to a more realistic blackout proceeding across a landscape, yes, it's far more complicated than most consumers realize. Power distribution systems are built when needed, they
are not engineered grids. For instance, a neighborhood will be fed from a substation that was designed twenty years ago to handle a specific load. Let's say a large apartment development is built. It wasn't even a dream when the substation was designed. So the power for the apartments has to come in on an underground feed from a different substation than the one that feeds the overhead lines to the rest of the neighborhood. The other substation might be several miles away.
Then you get into devices known as sectionalizers and reclosers that can shut off and isolate one block at a time. If a car takes out a pole in front of your house, the power doesn't go off all over town because a sectionalizer opens up between the crash site and the substation. Everyone upstream of the secitonalizer still has power.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: "For crying out loud, read the freakin' manual."
Re: City rolling blackout effect? by Brian Berneker on Apr 18, 2008 at 2:15:20 am
Hey that sounds pretty interesting... I'd like to see how the ACTUAL light pattern goes out rather than the standard "Hollywood" cliche. I guess it all depends on your audience for how realistic it needs to be. For example, how many computer screens or HUD displays have you seen in movies that are complete B.S...? (Jurassic Park comes to mind)
Re: City rolling blackout effect? by mark cookman on Apr 18, 2008 at 11:45:23 am
[david bogie]"Then I got a Photoshop expert on the project. She handled it completely differently and was able to apply some magic to the original night scene so it actually looked like the lights were OUT"
Would you be able to describe the magic she did in a little more depth?
Re: City rolling blackout effect? by Jeremy Allen on Apr 18, 2008 at 6:46:39 pm
Since you're able to shoot this yourself, it might help to shoot the scene during the day and at night. Maybe shoot it just before dusk before most of the lights are on. Then do some "day for night" color manipulation, and mix it with the night time shot for the lights on... Obviously the trick would be getting the same framing for both shots, but it could be done with proper planning, or maybe spend a few hours at the location with a locked off tripod.. And I like the previous idea of bracketing the exposures for more flexibility in the final composite.. just a thought.
Re: City rolling blackout effect? by david bogie on May 1, 2008 at 8:54:11 pm
Talked to our PS geek, she used a masked layer for each building in the skyline. She remapped the colors that were in some of the windows so they would be mapped to blacks or grays. She enhanced the image in a way only she and I could appreciate by making a few exterior areas appear as if being lit with red emergency lighting.
I don't use Photoshop so I don't know what the analogous filter is in PS to AE's Tint.
It's the masking that created the magic isolation but it was the remapping of the colors that sold the illusion that the lights were OUT instead of just covered up.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: "For crying out loud, read the freakin' manual."
