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Making fire footage look ‘in’ scene.
Hello all,
This is my first post, mostly because I’ve hit an end point on how I should proceed with my scene.
The facts:
Using VC’S action 2k fire footage.
The scene is of two cavemen having a romantic time in front of the fire.
We were shooting day for night, and have had to composite fire into their fire pit.I’ve masked it in, made a pre-comp of two layers of fire to make it look ‘fuller’ and it’s all good on that end. The problem I’m having is that it just looks fake.
I’ve set a light with an expression to wiggle the intensity and also on position to give it a little bit more of a flicker.Should I add Glow or Blur to the fire (maybe even liquefy) to simulate the heat coming off of it? would that make it more believable?
or
Should I add something to the lights (or a different attack altogether)?
anyway I wrote a book, I apologize but I didn’t have time to write a shorter letter.
some help on this would be fantastic and also thanks creative cow for the forum it has saved my ass many times before.
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8 Replies
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Problem with fire- making it believable- it’s in the shadows. You can’t get the real thing in post. What you can try to do is to play with shadows on the cave walls, on their faces and on the ground. All the shadows pf course need to move according to the way the fire moves.
Lightwrap the fire when you comp that in. A bit of glow may help.Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania -
Oh, one more thing- before doing that, consider re-shooting with a fire in front of the actors…
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania -
[Erik Hofmann] “I’ve masked it in, made a pre-comp of two layers of fire to make it look ‘fuller’ and it’s all good on that end. The problem I’m having is that it just looks fake. “
Can you post a still? It’d be easier to give some suggestions if we could see what you were up against.
[Erik Hofmann] “Should I add Glow or Blur to the fire (maybe even liquefy) to simulate the heat coming off of it? would that make it more believable?”
That might help — I bet you could use Turbulent displace.
[Erik Hofmann] “Should I add something to the lights (or a different attack altogether)?”
I bet that re-lighting would help you quite a bit. If the fire had been there in the shot, it would have cast light on objects around it; to sell your shot, you’ll probably want to replicate that effect.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
use an “obscuration” layer to modulate the intensity of the light source on another layer so that the wiggle of the fire brightness will affect the actors. It looks very convincing. Good luck.
https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/obscuration.html
https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/
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@ Ted and Dave, live fire would have been fantastic, agreed and re-shoots are not going to happen, but yes the lesson isn’t lost ‘get it in camera’ is my new phrase on set after this debacle.
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ok, so the obscuration layer sounds intriguing but I don’t entirely understand, is there a video tutorial where I can see it in action? or will I just have to play around with it?
Also walter the turbulent displace sounds like it could help I will work with both tonight.
thanks for the tips, also I don’t know how to post a snapshot, otherwise I would. once again something more I get to look into tonight.
erik
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It’s pretty straighforward from the motionscript website how to do it, and Dan in the expression forum here is the guy who actually made the webpage and more than likely wouldn’t mind helping you tweak your expressions up a bit.
There’s like a million posts on here you can search out but the best effects I have found are cc vector blur and particular, they are simply amazing plugins. Videocopilot has a bunch of fire videos too that focus on details like small particles and smoke. Those sell a lot, but the most important thing to remember is that both the intensity AND the interval have to be random.
https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/
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Don’t be afraid to try out different transfer modes too. I didn’t see any mention of TM implementation on your post.
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