Causing an Explosion in School

The final project we had the privilege to work on was to film over a green screen and apply it into a real life scenario. I worked with my colleague Travis Howell on a project that kind of resembled building an airplane as it was flying.
We had the original idea of filming ourselves on a green scree and import ourselves to make it seem as though we were walking down a hallway. Because we had a couple weeks to work, we decided to take it one step further and animate the hallway ourselves.
I went into Maya and started thinking: what exactly would you find down a school hallway? The answers were fairly simple: lockers, trash cans, bulletin boards, doors etc. I started by making a simple box that would eventually serve as the hallway. I only used it for a few minutes to animate the original locker that I would later duplicate many times to give the illusion that there were a plethora of lockers that stood down the hallway. As soon as I sculpted the first locker, I duplicated it many times and as soon as there was a basic layout, I hid the layer that contained the hallway and began going to work on more specific aspects of the lockers.
Once I had textured and put in all the little details of the lockers, I brought the hallway back into the project and began thinking of what else was missing. Naturally, I thought of a trashcan.
The trashcan was a simple build; all I had to do for the trashcan was to build a cylinder and delete half of a sphere and combine them. I decided to take it one step further, so I added a quick illustration I did of a fairly generic high school name and elected to put it on the trash can.

The next step was to animate the doors, and Travis Howell was in charge of those so he gave them to me and I had the ability to import them and simply jut them into the sides of my hallway. Next, I had to include lighting, so I used an ambient light and it lit the hallway perfectly. I would eventually change the lighting in After Effects, but it effectively did what I needed it to do for the time being. The final product was this:

The next step was filming. Travis Howell and I went down to the e-Communication studio which is essentially one large green screen. We filmed multiple shots, but stuck with one shot specifically which was just an over-the-shoulder shot of me "walking" that we would later stick into the actual project. After we took care of the filming, we dragged the footage into a new After Effects composition which already had the hallway shot ready to go. One problem we noticed right away was that when I went to remove the green screen, there was just enough of a green reflection on parts of me that I became a little transparent when I was walking. Thankfully, I had help in correcting the problem by darkening the footage and playing around with a lot of borders. With this finally taken care of, I added an adjustment layer because of a new direction I decided I wanted to take the project.

Because the camera I used to zoom through the hallway seemed a little quick, I got the sense that my walking had to be urgent, as if I had to rush to do something. I decided the lighting needed to be a little moody to fit the scenario.  Below are the "before" and "after" shots respectively.

I decided to add an explosion behind the double doors at the end of the hallway which would resolve to the viewer why there was a sense of urgency in my walking. After I threw in the explosion, I added a few softened glows to emphasize the brightness and illumination of the fire. Afterwards, I knew that an alarm would be necessary, so I went to ismfilms.com to find a few sirens that I threw in. After that, I took a new Matte layer and constantly changed the velocity to make it look like there was a red siren behind me.

For the end of the project, I knew credits were necessary, but I didn't want to be obnoxious about them because the clip was only about 25 seconds long. I added the title "Union High School" to fade in after a black background layer faded over everything except the siren while keeping the alarms going off. After the title fade back away, I gave two simple names: Sean Lewis and Travis Howell. I had the idea that that would be all that was necessary to give the sense of hopelessness rather than cheer. Below was the final result after two renders.