Featured video: Missiles strike Lewis and Clark Viaduct
Experience an aerial attack on Kansas City without any of the fallout
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Last week I got an e-mail from my friend Teresa with the urgent message that there was a video I strongly needed to consider writing about on the site.
Upon viewing the four-second clip she attached, I was shocked to see aerial footage of two missiles striking the Lewis and Clark Viaduct Bridge.
I raced to the window of our downtown office to see if I could see any traces of the fallout, but aside from a few cirrus clouds, the sky was perfectly clear.
Was this an early April Fool's joke or was our humble cowtown really under attack? I quickly e-mailed Mark Clarkson, the contact whose name Teresa included in the e-mail, to find out what exactly was going on.
How did you get such up-close footage of the missiles striking Kansas City?
Well, of course I didn't. It's just an animation I made for fun, and as a way to avoid other work that I was supposed to be doing instead.
Why did you select this location as the impact zone?
Funnily enough, it was fairly random. I was looking for an aerial view of Wichita, my home town. But the first interesting photo that Google served up was this one. It might as easily have been Cleveland or Toledo, but happened to be Kansas City. Since I have friends in Kansas City that I thought might be amused, I decided that was fine.
How did you create the animation?
I used Adobe After Effects, which is motion graphics and compositing software — it's basically Photoshop for video.
Video is expensive and hard to come by. It's not really worth it for a quick little fun project like this, so I started with a JPG photograph. If you just slide a photograph around, your eye will instantly pick up the fact that it's looking at a flat photo. So the first thing I did was to "map" that photo onto a simple 3D "ground" and "sky." Now, when the 3D camera moves, you get subtle but realistic shifts in perspective that help to sell the illusion.
I added movement to the image and by cutting out tiny cars and trucks that are visible on the roads, then pasting them in again on top of the background. I animated them moving along the roads. From this altitude, they're just little blocks of pixels, so no real detail was required, but it adds movement to the background plate and, again, helps sell the illusion of moving video. I also created some simple fake waves on the river, and animated a "flare" of the sun reflecting off of the river, which moves as the camera shifts position.
For the missiles, I used After Effects built-in particle generator to create fire and smoke. The explosion itself is a combination of video of a real explosion and a simple another lens flare, tinted yellow.
I've posted a breakdown of the shot online, where I show how the different effects are put together.
Seeing my hometown under attack reminded me a bit of the film "The Day After." Are there any disaster films you especially admire?
I was a teenager in the 70's when disaster movies were a staple of the film industry: Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Airport XX, ad infinitum, so it's in my movie DNA. And as a kid I loved films like When Worlds Collide, but mainly for the spaceships. My favorite disaster movies, though, would probably be Dr. Stangelove and The Andromeda Strain, which aren't really the action-explodey variety.
Place in KC you'd least like to see destroyed:
Worlds of Fun! My son and I make a yearly father-and-son trip up the turnpike to ride the roller coasters, so I hate to see them destroyed. An the other hand, if I can find a good aerial photo of them ... :o)
Mark Clarkson is an animator and author based in Wichita. He does a range of computer graphics, from photo retouching and repair to 3D and motion graphics, and has written seven books on subjects ranging from Photoshop to Battlebots. See more exampes of his work at www.markclarkson.com.
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