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.
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| 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… |
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| 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. |
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| 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) |
