Command and Conquer : Red Alert Tribute HD (Motion Graphics Animation Intro)
29(Note: Music that was originally in this video has now been removed using youtube's song removal tool, so you may hear some muffled remains of the music in the background and sound effects.)
This is a tribute to C&C Red alert since I have been a fan for a long time. I created (Composite) the video in Apple Shake and Edited in Final Cut Pro.
This video was meant for a Uni assignment, so I decide to based my video on red alert. This video kind of explains the origin story of red alert with some cool effects.
I tried to be original in the video by not using/putting any images or videos from the command and conquer games, with a couple of exceptions- allied/soviet logo, chronosphere., Einstein handshake and so on.
I did use photos of the real Einstein, Stalin and Hitler to create a 'real feeling'. The story or actions described in this video does not represent the real life people portray in the photos of the video, This is a work of Fiction and should not be used as facts or taken seriously.
Behind the Scenes:
Originally I planned this video to be longer and make it more like a 'live-action' movie intro, the second part was suppose to display cast and crew names (mainly westwood staff and actors/actress from RA1 and RA2) while using photos of real life miltary vehicles, tanks, ships and planes that represent the units in Red Alert 1, but I ran out of time since this was a Uni assignment, didn't realise it would take me so long to composite the video in shake.
Why did I use westwood logo instead of ea logo? this is a tribute to the original creators. For the music(Removed) I wanted it to be new yet still had the traditional feel, so I didn't want to use the original Hell march 1 or 2 cause they have been used too often, so I used the hell march 1 remix from red alert 3 as its new yet old school.
The video has a couple of references and influences/inspiration from various C&C games.
- eva logo and blue grid map- style inspired from Westwood cancelled C&C3 (Tiberian Twilight)
- 'blue light effects on handshake,chronosphere and other pics- Red Alert time travel and chronosphere effects.
-red map, black(metal) background - red alert 2 menu style.
'Loading' texts and bar- westwood's EVA installation videos of the games.
- Gold to white C&C logo- reference to original gold C&C logo to the new white one.
- red to 'mix red' red alert logo- reference to original red alert logo which was fully red in colour to the new red alert 3 logo.
It took about 2 weeks to make this video- due to the number of problems I had working in Shake (my first time) and rendering out in Final Cut Pro.
1 day- plan out concept and what I want in the video
1 day- looking for pictures, editing some
1 day- drawing storyboards
1 day- planning each animation of the video, frame by frame
4 days- compositing video in Shake.(animations and effects took forever to do)
2 day- editing in Final Cut Pro, adding edited music (found problems in video)
2 days - rendering( had problems maintaining full HD quality, small file size and playback problems)
The main problems I had creating this video was rendering out of final cut pro,
- when rendered out, the video seems to be missing certain effects( the black white line background, it was just black in the video). Had to render out from shake, then final cut with only video to keep size down, then edited new video with music and finally render out video. I slowed down the video to 75%, but when I did that, the black/white background disappear, even adding any effects in Final cut like fade or dissolved - background disappear both in render and viewer, it annoyed me big time. I believe the problem was working in HD.
- working in shake and final cut (it was really laggy because working in full HD)
- finding animation bugs, errors glitch and so on AFTER rendering out final video, ( couldn't see problems originally due to turning down viewer quality, so footage bugs were blurred out and couldn't be seen,)
- Playback ( So many different formats to render out with, most maintain quality but size was about 10G which was too much, other were small but very blurry, I thought I finally solve it by using DVCPro HD, only to find there were problem playing back in other video/media players, eventually it worked in H264, but audio doesn't work in vlc or WMP but works in Quicktime (So annoying). I eventually converted the whole video to MP4 with still H264 at 1920x1080 looks same quality as before, but audio is now AAC instead of the original '32bit Little Endian.'
Apple Shake is a pretty good program to use one you get the hang of it (for those people who don't know- Shake doesn't use 'layers' to composite unlike after effects or final cut pro, instead it uses 'macros' and you create 'tree branch/web' groups of the macros.) Shake also uses similar compositing methods to 'Nuke'(another compositing program).
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