A little hello from Fox Newbold, Lorelei Newbold, Betsy Newbold, and Nana Melon!

On my front driveway I time-lapse myself painting a carpet green for what will be the floor of the backyard greenscreen stage. The carpet has been primed with two different primers on its underside,   more...which is the surface that will be used for the floor. Of course, I couldn't resist having a little fun in post-production...heh-heh!  less

Test footage of the Tyrant's hometown volcano, for the movie "EMPIRE HIGHWAY". The townspeople worship an ancient volcano god named La'Vah, who, it turns out, is an actual supernatural being   more...who lives inside the mountain. The volcano itself is just a piece of artwork I very quickly whipped up in Photoshop, but I'll probably build the volcano as a physical model for the actual movie. The lava effects will most likely still be composited animation. Please forgive my horrendous misspelling of "TyrantUlania". Ugh!! I'm also kinda giddy today because I learned a new trick in MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 14: how to create more complex motion paths for video using the "Movement" feature. That's how I created the shaky-cam slow zoom on the caldera.  less

As Larry videotapes me painting my old loafers green to complete my chroma key suit, we get to talking, as we often do, about movies, monsters, and special effects. This is our typical banter and we   more...hope you enjoy just kicking back and eavesdropping on our conversation.  less

I had bought myself some green paint at HomeDepot for the purpose of making chroma key backgrounds. Doing chroma keying in animation is easy, but I wanted to see how much work it would be for live-action   more...chroma keying. I painted a large canvas green and propped it up on the kitchen counter behind me. I also shot this foortage with mt $100.00 digital webcamcorder, rather than my Sony Digital-8 camcorder, which is what I normally use, just because I wanted to ase how well the editing software would work under crappy shooting circumstances. As you can see, I got pretty darned good results, even with the uneven lighting, whiuch was just the room lights in the kitchen, and nothing else.Oh, And a desk lamp lighting me. Then I just started grabbing various bits of animation I had done (which you will see in other videos here and there) and started using the various chroma key and luminance key functions of Magix Movie Edit Pro 11 to make layers of keyed video, just to see how well it worked. This experiment laid the foundation for the work I've done in the "Tyrannovision" series. By the way: That green canvas back there and that messy kitchen is where I currently shoot my Tyrannovision videos, just to show youhow easy this stuff is to do nowadays. Why is the kitchen a mess? because I'm too busy making videos!

I was also playing around with Morpheus for the first time, so you'll see some examples of that as well.

Many of youhave requested video tutorials from me about special FX and editing. But while I haven't gotten around to making one yet, I thought I would at least share with you my experimental footage to give you a glimpse into my process.

SOFTWARES USED:
MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 11 (For compositing in chroma- and Luma-key. TerryBubble uses this as well. Check out his channel for his own chroma key tutorial)
Morpheus (for morphing, natch. I also played a bit with photo warping, but Onhand is much easier for that)
OnHand Wild Photo Effects (A photo-warping program that I use EXTENSIVELY for a lot of my animation)
Audacity (For cleaning up the audiotape recordings of original music)
Windows Movie Maker (My main editing workhorse, and it's easy to save to different formats with readouts of what your final file size will be)

MUSIC: "Oprahvsky!" by Baron Dixon, based on Beethoven's "Pastorale" and Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker", inspired by an early 1990's Oprah Winfrey theme song.  less

In our new movie project "Blood Bath of the Bat-Beast", there is a scene involving a young couple licking exotic frogs to get high. Writer/Director Larry Lo Presti assigned me the task of breathing   more...life into a fake rubber frog for the moments before its "capture". Here's how I did it....  less

Short taster of some of my youtube videos from http://www.youtube.com/iggy35