Filming with Fire is Frightening-Motion Tracking Gone Wrong

Week 2-Motion Tracking

In high school I used After Effects to track motion and basically CGI’d myself into a pyrotechnic. Sadly I no longer have this clip to show.

Since it is a valuable skill, I have tried this task before, but it took so long and I wished for a easier method than the one I used on my free editing software.

I followed the steps laid out on this website to produce this video in which I wave a ‘lit’ match around.

I did not mind following this tutorial, however, it is the method I had used before–which I mentioned earlier is quite tedious and not very precise. In general, I have a hard time following written instructions as I tend to misread things in my haste and need to re-do stuff. I had misread something and had to practically restart, but I had not gotten far to begin with.

Also: the software that I am using does not include ‘green-screening’ for free, so I used this website to edit the background out of my flame clip before editing it into my video. unscreen only does five second clips for free, though, so I had to cut a few seconds on my video to accommodate this.

Once I had finished my project, I exported the video. Upon reviewing the file, I realized that it had not exported properly. I changed the export settings hoping to fix the problem, but got the same result each time I tried a different setting.

I had not edited a portrait video on this software and had assumed it would export the edits as shown on the preview (what is seen when edits are being added). This was not the case and it turned out that I needed to change the settings on the preview screen to see how it was actually going to look once exported. This is unnecessary on the platforms I have used in the past, so it irked me.

I changed the settings and re-did the whole edit. I did not take my time with this version, and it shows, but I did not have the time or patience to do it properly.

In the coming weeks, I will be editing this video further, to make it seem like light is coming from the ‘fire’, and that the flame bends according to how it is moving, as well as adding sound effects to compliment the clip.