RO: Shot breakdown - RO_101_010
The opening shot of the sequence (not quite the opening shot of the film) isn’t going to be particularly difficult - at least, not when compared to some of the other shots.
You can either watch it on it’s own here, or as part of the whole sequence here
This shot will be a purely 2D shot. Backplate will be a crane on the roof of a building (or locked off… I need to find out what kind of budget we’re going to have for equipment), and the two foregrounsd characters will be shot against green-screen. Because of the amount of motion blur that they are going to have, we could almost get away with doing all of the horizontal motion and motion-blur in post. Keying people with lots of motion-blur off DV does not sound like my idea of fun at all. We will probably shoot both ways and then see how the key looks.
Best-case scenario is a lovely craning shot of the city and two easily keyable people with natural motion-blur.
Worst-case scenario is having to use a locked-off shot (or, god-forbid, a still) of the background and using manually cut-out/painted stills of the character and whacking the crap out of them with motion-blur so nobody realises that they aren’t actually moving.
May 25th, 2005 at 23:18
Why wouldn’t you use a still of the background and pan it to make it feel like it was a crane shot? I know it’s not the sam but it’s quite easy to make it look almost completely the same…and a lot cheaper while we’re at it
I think that if you have a locked of shot of a person on greenscreen who is in place and if you then animate the shot to make it seem like he’s moving…I believe it would be a simple and believable fake. You don’t want to go with keying that much motion blur… If you do shoot it in motion, keep the shutter closed up as much as humanly possible, so you’ll have as little motion blur as you can, and then you fake the blur. It will make your job a lot easier. I know how it is with keying blurred footage and I can agree that it is absolutely horrible
May 26th, 2005 at 8:48
If we did that (which would end up more as a vertical pan than a crane shot), then it would remove any element of paralax from the shot. Because this shot starts off looking like a straight opening shot of the city, I’d like to make it more than just a static shot.
May 30th, 2005 at 9:19
After studying your previz and the camera movement on it , personally I think that you should find a similar background and
take a hi-res still of it and then camera map it.
That way you will resolve the parallax issues.
In terms of getting a clean key…I don’t know which camera are you using but for that amount of motion blur you need
something with 4:4:4 colour space… If you’re stuck with a mini-dv (hope you’re not) then you can try getting your
footage into YUV colour space and blurring the U and V channel by 15-25% and then converting back to RGB.
That should help you get rid off jagged edges…
I’ts really hard to tell how much detail on the actors will be visible…would you consider using primitive cg stand-ins ?
You could make them in matter of a day-two and save yourself a lot of keying time + it’s kinda easier to match the
lighting in 3D…and also you could use them for some more similar shots.
good luck,
CroVFX
May 30th, 2005 at 11:47
With the newer, even closer, version of this shot (see this post), I think we could easily get away with using the digital doubles for it. We’ll already have digital doubles, as we will be using them in a few other shots….
The other plan would be to shoot them still, and add the movement and motion-blur in post - I think that might well be the best solution.
As for what we’re shooting on - at the moment, it’s looking like it’s going to be HDV (ouch) - although, budget depending, we may be using HDCAM for the VFX shots, and then degrading it to look like HDV after doing the VFX….