Patreon Peeks 5: Polishing a Pinball (Patreon)

Hello! Today I'd like to show a bit about my favorite scene from my recent video interviewing Brian Schmidt (https://youtu.be/wI8QiladrvY). Since his career took off in writing sound and music for pinball machines, I decided to theme the video after them, even creating arrangements of themes from one machine he worked on, Black Knight 2000 (I might talk about the music in a later post, that had its own fun challenges).

So when I introduce Brian, I created a little pinball machine visual (starts at 0:15), in which the different bumpers and ramps are labeled with noteworthy positions of his, such as a slingshot mentioning he's the Game Audio Network Guild president.

I wanted to explain the pinball in particular. Normally I would build this scene in Blender, but when the scene called for the pinball bouncing off of objects, it ended easier to use 2D animation. But I still managed to give the pinball a reflective sheen to it, by completely faking it, in After Effects.

The pinball itself is just a white circle with a little highlight I drew on. The reflection layer is a map of the pinball table:

It gets overlaid on the pinball, with a "Bulge" distortion filter put on it. The image doesn't move with the pinball, but the bulge filter does. Finally, a circular mask and a gradient filter are added that also track to the pinball's position:

The result is a spherical-looking bulge that moves with the pinball, creating a "reflection" that isn't 100% accurate, but looks 100% reflective! And for even this short scene, it's a little bit of polish that makes the pinball pop, much more than it would if it were a blank black circle.

I'll be honest though: I wasn't sure about this scene until the music and sounds went along with it. They're doing the heavy lifting here. I'll talk more about them in a later post!