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Faking a Fly-Through

As editing progressed on the various teaser trailers for Bad Trip, it became obvious that we needed an establishing shot of our frozen winter environment. Too bad we couldn’t afford a helicopter. A helicopter fly-through would be cool.

But what if I could find a way to FAKE a helicopter shot? As I thought about this, an answer appeared in my head, crystal clear. I would fake it, using 2-D tricks. I would just need to take some photographs…
Mother Nature obliged my wish, dumping several inches of snow on us. I drove my car to NCAR, and walked partway along the pathway that we had originally followed to Mallory Cave, snapping several digital photos of the snow covered landscape. Later, at home, I cut those photos up into sections using Photoshop.
Using Commotion, I composited all of these pieces together with plates of snow particle animation that I had rendered for other shots. Using Commotion’s scaling and translation features, I faked a fly-through.

This was a tedious trial and error process in Commotion. Faking the proper parallax and perspective is tricky. I just eyeballed it, rendering it out, making adjustments, re-rendering it. On my G4, the renders were not spectacularly fast, so this fine-tuning process took a while until I was satisfied.

(It would have been much easier in Adobe After Effects, which has a 3-D camera that can fly-through 2-D layers.) (Alternately, I could have taken all of these images and mappped them to flat cards in a real 3-D application, such as Lightwave and used a virtual camera to fly through the cards.)

I don’t think the end result will actually fool anybody into thinking we rented a helicopter, but it does what we intended it to do: it sets the scene, it tells the audience that our characters are in a remote, cold environment. We wound up using the shot twice, in two different trailers. One of them is below:

(Right Click Here to Save) (MP4 - 9 MB)

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Making it Snow

Sometimes Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate.

The day of our shoot, we got bright sunny weather instead of the snowy blizzard our scene called for. We were running out of time, and not able to re-schedule the shoot to another day when it possibly might snow. Nor could we afford to rent snow-making equipment. So we went ahead and shot our scene. We shot on the north side of the mountain, so there would be less sunlight to deal with.

Above, you can see the result. Even though it WAS cold, and there was snow on the ground, it didn’t really LOOK cold. Robb Kramer, the director of this shoot, asked me if I could put falling snow in the scene in post production. At first I told him no, but then I thought about it and realized that it could be done pretty easily.

I rendered “snow” particles using Commotion’s included particle rendering system. It’s a very simple 2-D particle system, but I rendered out four different “plates” of particles with different settings applied. I then combined these same four plates again and again in various fashions with the live-action footage.

in some shots, I had to rotoscope people and trees into different layers, so that the snow could go “behind” them. Once the shots were broken into different layers, it was no big deal to remove depth-of-field by blurring the background and/or foreground layers, to bring more attention to the subject of each shot. Color correction was done in Commotion as well, though I fine-tuned it in Final Cut Pro.

Getting the snow to fall at the right speed and appear to be the right size required a lot of experimentation. The end results are far from perfect, but I think they work well enough considering the short amount of time I put into fixing these shots. It’s kind of hard to appreciate the moving particles in still photos, so below is the finished teaser trailer.

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A change in order

Sometimes a shot just doesn’t come out the way it needs to. Sometimes, when you are editing, you wish that the take could be shorter, or longer, to fit into the pacing of the overall program.

BEFORE

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Take this shot for instance. It’s a great shot, showing our three characters struggling up the mountain. Problem is, our actors really were struggling! Climbing up this slippery pathway was very difficult, and very dangerous. While they were following each other as closely as they could, to the camera they are too spread out. The shot was just too long, and we could not use it as it was because it broke the rhythm we were trying to establish with our editing. Also, the characters were in a different order than in the shot we show previously. What to do?
AFTER

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Here’s what I did: using Commotion, I rotoscoped out our trailing actor, and put him in between the first two! This dramatically shortened the shot, and improved our continuity: now the characters were in the proper order.

Rotoscoping is a process where you trace a character or object frame by frame, so that you may cut it out or combine it with other elements. In this case, I pretty much had to trace parts of each actor, in order to combine them in this new way. I also used difference and luminence mattes, (that is, computer generated masks based on differences in motion and picture brightness) to help me composite this shot.

Believe it or not, this SHOULD have been an easy thing to do, with the camera locked down in one position. It took me a little bit of extra time to do, however, because if you look closely at the BEFORE shot, you will see the camera MOVE as the first climber passes by - (he didn’t bump the camera, but by walking beside it, the snow the tripod was resting on shifted.)

This little un-intended camera move made this shot much more difficult, and I had to fudge a few things to get in finished in a single day.

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Changing the View

We found an ALMOST perfect cave not far from where we lived. While the cave itself was great, we didn’t like the view. But that was okay, because we knew we could change it.

We had scheduled the shoot for a Saturday morning, and we decided to go ahead, even though it was starting to snow. Thankfully, the hike to the cave was short, but the path was slippery with ice from previous snowfalls. Using ropes, we made the final ascent to the cave.
The snow was coming down like crazy at this point, and it looked great. We set up the camera in the cave, and shot a lock-down shot of our three actors entering. We had them mime crawling up over a ledge, as if there was a drop-off immediately outside the cave (which there wasn’t, as you can see in the photo above.)
Knowing that the background was going to be replaced, I exposed the shot so that the backround would be blown out, making it easy to pull a key.
Using Commotion, (a great program created by some guys at ILM that has sadly been left to die by Pinnacle Systems), I touched up the mattes I was pulling using the luminance keyer, and composited in a background of mountains, moving clouds and mist, and several layers of snowflakes, nearly two dozen layers in all. Though it only took me a few hours to rotoscope the actors and set the compositing process up, it took my Apple G4 computer nearly three days to render out the shot! Below you can watch the finished shot:
(Right Click Here to Save) (MP4 - 7.5 MB)

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Extending the Scenery

Extending the Scenery

We wished to get an epic feel for our preview trailer for Bad Trip. Problem is, we had no money, and less time. We couldn’t afford to take our actors, and drive several hours into the mountains to get the shots we wanted.

BEFORE


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We decided to shoot close to home. After all, Boulder has some spectacular terrain. We just needed to enhance it some, to raise the elevation a little.

As we hiked up to Mallory Cave during a snowstorm, we paused every now and again, to grab some shots. Above you can see one such shot. Nice, but the tilt-up just shows a plain white sky.
AFTER


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When it came time to edit this scene, we realized that it would play better if we flopped the shot left to right. So we did. But wouldn’t it be great if when the camera tilts up, we see MORE mountain?

Using Photoshop, I combined several photographs to create a massive wall of rock. Using Commotion, I tracked the camera motion of the original shot, created mattes using the luminence keyer and rotosplines, and married the new Photoshopped artwork to it. I added snow and fog to help blend it all together.

The end result: We didn’t have to drive all the way up to 10,000 feet in the middle of a snowstorm to get our shot.

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