PLEASE STAND BY - Pip-Boy Security Camera Feed

Fallout is single-handedly one of my favourite games of all time, it offers everything I love in the most extreme what if scenarios, handling everything from survival, morality and exploring the most dangerous parts of a post nuclear world.

Back during the launch of Fallout 4 they did a limited edition that included a Pip-Boy, I screamed internally when I saw this and to this day it is one of my favourite collectables.

My Set Up.

I was at Mount Stewart just outside of Newtownards, like always wherever I go as of recent I always bring my camera and my camcorder when I cam across a lovely walled off garden and that's when it hit me to use one of the walls surfaces as an entrance to a vault. After filming in one of the shadowy areas of the garden, I went home and got somethings set up in my room.

(The Rose Garden, Mount Stewart).

I don't own any lighting equipment so I had to get creative, I got my camcorder set up on my tripod and then used the elastic strap behind my chairs head rest in order to hold a light source in place to try and eliminate as many shadows as I could form the face of the green cloth, I had cut this prior to filming and stuffed behind the bulky wrist computer.

(My recording set up for home).

Once I had filmed everything that I needed I set to work at editing this all together.

The Dynamic Duo, After Effects and Premiere Pro.

In a few of Jonny's lessons he had shown us how to use Camera tracking, and I wanted to use the example he gave us for the Mech. I looked online for a Rusty Door 3D Object that I could use to simulate a vault door. In the Fallout series humanity retreats into bunkers created by Vault Tech in order to wait out the apocalypse. I scanned through the footage with the Tracker.

After scanning through, like in the Mech video I created another solid and then accessed the 3D software that Jonny had given to experiment with.

After getting it set up I went into the 3D editor space and imported the door I had found online.

During this time I noticed that door was extremely small, compared to the imported mech we had used previously this thing was like a crumb, no matter how much I manipulated the size it was beginning to give my computer trouble the bigger I scaled it up. When I scaled it up to a certain size it would just disappear, I looked through multiple camera views to see if it was somewhere else in the 3D space but was unable to see it when I scaled it up to 300%.

I did more research online and seen there were a variety of doors and vault doors, but the prices ranged from $20-$100 dollars and after the experience I just had with the size I decided to leave it. I didn't want to risk spending money on an asset that could maybe work, however it did give me an appreciation for Lee recommending the 3D modelling software's early on. Due to the experiences I have had during this educational year I didn't really have the time to experiment much with Blender, but going forward whenever I approach something like this again I will put time into learning it over the summer.

I returned to After Effects to continue working on the rest of the components, such as keying out the green screen on the Pip-Boy.

As you can see my first attempt did not go well at this, I knew I was missing something simple which ended up being a mask. I went into Mocha AE to make a mask going around the the screen, which gave me the result I was looking for!

After making the mask, I keyed out the green and then copied the video layer and inverted the copied layers mask in order to give the Pip-Boy the blacked out screen to add the footage I recorded prior in Mount Stewart.

I went into the Outdoor Footage in After Effects to add a green screen overlay for a CCTV style filter over the footage to make it look like a security camera for the vault. Once I had achieved this I went into Premiere Pro and added a TV shutting down visual effect that I had found on YouTube to make it look like the camera footage had shut off. (Like in all my blogs, I will include links at the bottom of the page after the video to show the resources I downloaded from YouTube).

I then assembled the indoor footage of the Pip-Boy and the Outdoor footage together in After Effects, I altered the scale a good load of times to make sure everything could be seen clearly on the Pip-Boy screen before moving onto Premiere Pro to add some sound effects.

I added a siren sound effect that I got from an in game recording from Fallout 4 on my PC and just imported it as an audio file, after I searched online to see if there were any Pip-Boy sound effects just simulating it booting up and tried to time it with the light on the device coming on. After I had everything in I selected the sound tab and made some adjustments, using the large room effect to make it sound like the room was a lot larger like in that of a facility, as well as tweaking the power up sequence so it could be heard better.

After I had the effects all in place I shortened the audio clips to the desired lengths and added some transition effects. Once I was happy I went back into After Effects and added some colour correction to make it more drab looking as well as adding a Bleach overtone from the creative drop down.

Wrapping up.

This project only took a few hours to create, but I wish I was more knowledgeable in Blender I learned a valuable lesson that being able to create your own assets such as a Vault door is a great skill to have under your belt. I plan to look at blender in more depth going forward as well as practice green screening a little more in the future, however I am extremely happy with how the end clip turned out even if I couldn't get the vault entrance in the end.

My video is below, thanks for reading!

Resources used from YouTube/Various.

• Pip-Boy SFX - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTvducynPKQ

• TV Turn Off Effect - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMWmwYquiVE

• Green Screen, Security Camera Filter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX-YEYIajjU

• Rusty Door - https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/free-3ds-model-door-ready/764583

• Rust Texture - https://www.3dxo.com/textures/5266_rust_259