For my final year project I created a visual effects piece using 3D tracking and 3d modelling, I created the hoax to draw attention to the final piece, it recieved over 40,000 views on YouTube and was spead to UFO forums and website across the world. The hoax was a lot of fun to make, I made two videos of the same object from two different angles (One in a helicopter and one in a car), this meant the two videos both complimented each other and people would comment telling me about the other video. A lot of people believed it (until I revealed the hoax), in particular the section shown above was cited as a reason it could be real, the UFO can be seen behind the grating on a footbridge. This was really simple to achieve but gave it so much credibility.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1udUcR10y0w – Car Footage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TRlb7gMq_M – Helicopter Footage

The response was great, the videos as well as the resulting copies uploaded by others had a total of approx 20,000 views.  A lot of people said it was a fake but there were a lot who also believed it was possible. Some even went as far as to defend the hoax offering up explanations as to why these things can happen without hundreds of people seeing them. The objective of this hoax was to spark discussion I could then direct to the hoax reveal video.

When I revealed the hoax I received quite a bit of hate mail.

The final piece was a video taken in a field which was then tracked using PFTrack and then the 3D plane models were overlayed on top of the footage. This was the first time I had ever tried 3D motion tracking and even 3D modelling so it was a major learning process for me. I was fairly happy with the end result although I think more work on the materials of the planes would have made it look a lot more realistic. I am currently redoing this video to include the things I have learnt about materials and texturing since the project ended.

These are some of the 3D models I have created over the past year or so. Some were used in project but some will remain in my assets folder until I can work them in to future projects some how.

This is a bit of a side project I’m working on, I’m turning an image in to a video by manipulating cut out sections.