Tools of the Dream Trade
Over the past year I've gotten many inquiries about what tools I use to make
my dreams. So I've finally decided to write something describing how I
ended up using the tools I do and hopefully help others get started making there
own creations.
The first dreams I did were done using HD video found on the internet that I
simply looped.
Under
Water is an example of one of my looped dreams. Looping video dreams
require you slowly fade the beginning of the video onto the end of the video or
adding the reverse of the video at the end. In both cases, the last frame
of the video is also the first frame so that it loops. While I never used
Vista's Movie Maker, I believe you can do the video fade technique using it, and
the best part is that it's free with Vista. The tool that I personally
would use for this, however, is
Adobe's After Effects.
After doing a few HD video dreams, I started using After Effects to create
more abstract dreams using particles and fractal noise. I found many
tutorials for After Effects that quickly got me up to speed on using it.
My favorite being Andrew Kramer's
Video Copilot
tutorials. You can do a lot with After Effects right out of the box.
I created the
Apollo
dream using only After Effects, and without any plug-ins. I now use After
Effects for all my video editing needs and it is by far the best tool in my
arsenal. I can do all sorts of final touchups, including color adjustments
and light ray effects. I can't say enough about how great After Effects is
and how it got me interested in graphic design.
After doing a few dreams in After Effects, I decided to take a leap into the
wondrous world of 3d modeling using
Autodesk's 3ds Max. At first it was a bit intimidating as there where
so many more options, menus, controls and terminology. Again, I searched
the internet for tutorials and slowly pieced together my first master skin;
Good
Night Earth. Having done the Earth before in my Apollo dreams, it was
a great place to start. Not to mention, the Earth is a simple 3d shape to
create.
Lately, I discovered fractal flames using
Apophysis and found a way to
animate them (Check out my
Spiral
Ghost dream to see what I'm talking about). This really caught my eye
and some of the fractals (called flames) out there look amazing. Again,
I'm searching the internet again for more tutorials on creating flames.
However, as I found out, creating a cool flame doesn't always translate into
cool animations. It requires trial and error to create a flame that looks
cool as a single image and also animates well.
The final tool I use and is also the final step in the dream creating process
is TMPGEnc 4
XPress. After outputting my dream video from After Effects as an
uncompressed video, I use TMPGEnc 4 XPress to convert my video into a MPEG-2
video for packaging up into my .dream file using DreamMaker. I found this
tool to do a very good job at encoding once I found/understood what the options
do.
Well, that about sums it up. I hope you enjoyed this brief
autobiography of the Master Baron.