I spoke last week about this new project I’m going to be working on, andmentioned that there were four (so far) main sequences that I would be working on.

Every wednesday, for the next four weeks, I’m going to run through, in more detail, what I expect to have to do for each sequence, and how I’m currently planning on going about it. This will hopefully give me a good chance to get my thoughts together well in advance of the shoot. I’m also hoping that those of you who are reading this and are much more experienced that I am at this will be able to point out the many (I expect) areas that I’m mising out on, or am over-complicating things.

Anyway…. CG Goldfish….

This sequence will involve a goldfish talking to the main character. Any shot where the goldfish is talking will be a locked-off shot (thankfully), and there will be a number of shots where the goldfish is just being a normal fish. Because the fish will be in the room throughout the whole film (I’d imagine so, anyway), all of the non-talking fish will be a real fish in a real bowl. The CG shots will be where the fish is actually talking, and any shots where it is listening and has to stay still and not swim around. (I’ve never come across a trained goldfish that can do this kind of thing - anyone know one? )

My current plan is to use the real bowl plus water, so that all the reflections and refraction of the background is there live. I’ll do loads of reference shooting to get the refraction through the glass and water measured. The goldfish would then be created inside a duplicate bowl, with refraction. Only the goldfish would be rendered.

I also plan to shoot the bowl with a green (or maybe black… would that work?) card inside it, to give me something I can use for the reflections on the front side of the bowl, to be comped back over the CG fish.

Obviously I’ll need to make sure I get things like HDRI maps of the room that we shoot in and detailed information about the camera set-up. I’ll also need a lot of reference photography of the real fish that’s being used in the other shots.

There are two other possible ways of going about this:

Completely replace the bowl/water/fish: Shoot it with an empty table/surface and make the whole bowl and contents CG. I’d rather not go that route, as doing the whole bowl in CG could be a lot more difficult than just the fish.

Use the real bowl, but do the water CG too…. I don’t quite get why this one might be better - if I were going to do this, I’d do the whole bowl CG (which I’m not so keen on for reasons described above)

I’d love to hear comments from people on how they feel I could approach this better…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005 at 11:54 and is filed under Roy's Odyssey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.