This was the single biggest pain in the butt of the whole video. The reason is because I only have four video tracks to work with on the timeline. Had I been able to afford the Ultimate Sony Vegas package I would have had unlimited video tracks as my disposal. While you may be thinking, "Well, you only have four band members. So, what's the problem?" The problem is that the background also counts as a video track. So, for every scene that shows all four band members I had to create a video with three of them and the background, then export that video. Then I had to take that video and use it as a new background and then composite the fourth member on top of it.

Since this could cause a serious degradation of video quality (kind of like a copy of a copy) I had to export it with no compression. This added another 50 gigs of video on the hard drive.

The next part takes some visualizing to get it right.

Since there are so many scenes that use funky camera angles a bit of understanding of perspective and a little practice with your "mind's eye" will be handy. For example, in the second image on the right you are looking up as if you are dead with this guy leaning over your body.

The winged creature floating above is the Spirit of Redemption in World of Warcraft which you can only see if you are dead (not counting the Priest's talented ability). It wouldn't look right to just have a head-on view of her. So, using WoWModelViewer I shot her from down below and off to the side to give the illusion of perspective. Then when composited into the scene it looks like she is there to waiting ressurect you.

There was also greenscreen compositing occuring in many background shotl. For example, in these images you can see the original image that I shot with my digital camera on the right. Then, I used Fireworks to green screen the, uh, screen. Then I put images and video on the screen while the characters were performing on the stage. (In case you are wonder about the green 'thing', it is the logo for Otronicon).

Finally, you will notice that all of the characters have shadows. This was done with a filter in Sony Vegas. Some of it had to be hacked a little bit to get it to look right but notice how the lights that I discussed earlier create believable shading on the backside of the characters.

In the following scene I used multiple layers of green screen to create the effect of the band playing on the roof of a building.

To pull this off I made an exact duplicate of the image of the building and the sky but removed the sky and replaced it with the green screen color. This is creating a mask. Then I put the original image on the bottom track, placed the characters in the tracks above, and then the edited background ( the Mask) on the top track. The unedited building covers up the bottom of the characters which were visible on top of the bottom track while the green screen let everything else show through. Add a little grainy effect and you have a rough outdoors video that looks like it was shot with a weathered security camera.