green screen flower explosion test

After researching some techniques on the creation of visual smoke, I came across on interesting video tutorial on youtube.

Link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03hKu9oTkuk

My origonal idea was to make my own smoke / bullet debri effects in maya using particles, but after watching this video I have began to experiment with more physical materials.

The video shows that by using just everyday baking flower and a straw, you can create very nice looking wall debri/smoke.

So I began experimenting with my own set up and materil. I began by going to the local mill and buying some coloured cloth. My idea was to film myslef blowing baking powered out of a straw, infront of a green screen.

Heres some pictures of my equipment;

So I started by hanging my home made greenscreen up on my wall. I used a few halogen lights I had sitting about my room to light the material. I then used a straw with a varying amount of flour and blew it across my greenscreen while filming. I experimented with a single and double barrel straw. I found that with such a small compact amount of flower my effect was coming out far to fast and traveling to far, out of of shot. So I rolled up some drawing paper and made a much wider tube. This ment I could get more on but when i blew on the end the powder would all come out at once with less force, not traveling as far.

I recored some nice experiments but when I imported my footage into Aftereffects I found it difficult to extract my powder effect from my background material, I found that my powder was far to light in colour and was being removed from y footage when I applied my KeyLight effect.

So I went back to the mill and bought some much darker fabric, a nice thick black material. This darker fabric worked much better, as the contrast between black and white powder was far more distinguable in post production. I am still experiencing problems when keying my colour in Aftereffects but I am going to conduct some further experiments and possible use some more lighting on my set. So below is a few screenshots of my set up and a few of my collected results.

Results;


Notice the different in clarity between the green and black backgrounds;^