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Can this be done in FCP? And How?
Hi all,
Not sure if you’ve seen this very clever and hilariously twisted video of Santa being interrogated by ’24”s Jack Bauer ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp19qiash2U or https://rebelchristmascard2009.com/ ) but as funny as I thought it was, I was more impressed by the editing.
After watching a couple times, I noticed that on the reverse over the shoulder shots they don’t seem to have used the “Santa Character”, and the lack of continuity with Jack’s wardrobe shows that this was taken from several different interrogation scenes, but other than that, the editing is brilliant IMHO.
Does anyone know how to do this? My guess was a combination of green screen, composites, and some sort of layering effect, but I don’t know how you would dice the 2-d footage into layers in FCP.
I realized I could do a single frame in photoshop, but even at the lowest possible frame rate, it would end up being a helluva lot of work for a gag video. My new guess is that if it’s not possible to somehow layer the depths in FCP (or Motion or After Effects) that they used a stand in for the over the shoulder shots of Jack, but I don’t know.
Can anyone either direct me to a more appropriate category for this post or help me figure out how this was done? The edit at 00:28 is very impressive, as is the pan from Santa to Jack at ~00:57 (These times reflect the ripped .mov file I created from the .flv original so the times might not be an exact match, but you’ll see what I mean.) If you want a copy of the ripped and converted .mov file give me your email address and I’ll send you the link to download from my iDisk.
Thanks in advance and my apologies if my terminology isn’t correct. I still have a lot to learn about editing, but when I see something like this, it’s like a magic trick that I have to solve, but I’m just not smart enough to figure it out on my own yet.
Happy editing,
MichaelMichael David Hutchinson
“That most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man.”–F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘The Great Gatsby’Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
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6 Replies
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Great video. But I don’t see any compositing at all, just two scenes cleverly cut together. It’s hard to scroll through a Youtube clip, but even the pan at :57 seconds looks like a cut or fast dissolve.
But maybe I’m just saying this to stay on Santa’s “nice” list
Cheers
John Christie
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It’s possible that all of Santa’s angle was shot in front of a green screen, however, he could have just been rotoscoped and cut out of a dark background with a soft edge, then simply dropped in where needed. The only shot that was even slightly tricky is the pan from Santa to Jack, but even that doesn’t appear to be too difficult.
Clearly, the guys who did this were careful to match the angles and the lighting. Those were the most important things. It’s really too bad that Jack’s wardrobe changes, I think it really kills some of the effectiveness of the work.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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Many thanks! So would that mean that they created a similar background to the ’24’ clips for the Santa scene and used a stand in for the shadowed knife threatening? Or that they just did some basic cropping of the two scenes to get the desired effect?
Much appreciated! You guys are awesome!
-mdhMichael David Hutchinson
“That most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man.”–F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘The Great Gatsby’ -
As always I’m humbled by the combined knowledge of the people here on this forum. Many thanks!
In complete agreement that the angles and lighting were the most important elements, and that the continuity lapses are a bit of a shame (though I showed this to several people who don’t work in video production and nobody noticed.)
I sort of see what you mean about shooting in front of a dark background and rotoscoping (still haven’t learned rotoscoping, but I get the basic idea and can probably find a forum on here that discusses rotoscoping at length) but I guess what really still baffles me is how he could be “dropped in” behind Jack but in front of the background.Many thanks and apologies for my general ignorance of what are probably amateur level concepts (pretty self-taught in FCP, so there’s a lot of basic stuff that I just don’t know),
All the best,
mdhMichael David Hutchinson
“That most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man.”–F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘The Great Gatsby’ -
Since the over-the-shoulder shots don’t show Jack’s face, only Nick’s, the simplest thing there is just find a guy of the same build, and shoot him in similar clothing in a similar room. Called using practicals.
If you go the rotoscoping route, you cut the matte around Jack’s body and head, and drop in a new layer shot in a similar room, similarly lit. If you don’t have the buget for the real room and stunt double, but you have time to burn in compositing and animating, you can find a wide shot of the original room as a still, paint out whoever was inthe chair before, map it as a texture map onto the inside walls of a 3-d cube, then add a layer with Nick in the chair now, using pure greenscreen. Now you have all the layers you need on separate tracks, you can suggest some camera pans and dolly moves by keyframing the positions, though your illusion only works in a narrow wedge to either side of the original angle, this being fake 3-d from 2-d composites.
That’s just off the top of my head.
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So it appears that within a little over a day, you guys have come up with 4 or 5 different ways to create this type of project. I’m honestly amazed by the knowledge here and your willingness to share it with me. I think the rotoscoping with Mark’s explanation of how to create a 3-d that would allow Santa to be “dropped in” is the closest to what I was imagining as I figured this was done by just a couple guys with little budget and lots of time.
I guess my curiosity stemmed from two things: 1) I was recently at a Dave Matthews concert and on the flight home, decided to kill some time by seeing how easy it would be to photoshop guitarist Tim Reynolds out of the shot and put myself in his place. It wasn’t that difficult, but I had to do some layering to make the depth of the shot appear realistic, and it got me to thinking how this could be applied to video.
2) I was unfortunate enough to happen upon a morning TV show where they were plugging yoostar.com (the green screen thing where you can “insert yourself into your favorite movie scenes”). While I thought this was just plain stupid and limited in its scope (no television = no Seinfeld = no point), I still didn’t know the technique that the creators used to make this possible. Then along came the Santa interrogation video and it piqued my curiosity.
Anyway, many many thanks to all of you who contributed in my curiosity, and anyone else with other ways to create this same effect.
As I’m pretty sure you’ve all made the nice list by offering your expertise to someone as inexperienced as myself, I’ll go ahead and make an exception to my “Happy Holiday” standard greeting and wish you all a very Merry Christmas,
mdhMany, many thanks!
Michael David Hutchinson
“That most limited of all specialists, the well-rounded man.”–F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘The Great Gatsby’
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