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A truly “simple” invisibilty effect?
I watched Eran Stern’s Invisible Cape tutorial which states it’s a “simple method.” However, to me, greenscreening your actor ahead of time isn’t simple. It takes planning and preparation and equipment you may not have.
What do you do if someone gives you preshot footage of an actor in an environment and needs you to make the infamous Predator look?
Well, I’m no AE expert, but I’m trying! I had an idea based on Maltaannon’s Particle Playground on Fire tutorial. If you take a locked down shot of a real life background (30 seconds or so), then have your talent act out their scene, can’t you use the Difference mode to somehow cheat this effect?
I shot a short segment and am trying it out, but coming up a bit short.
So far, I used Tint to greyscale all the footage, and used Difference on myself when I “go invisible.” I then precomped that and in a new comp, used the B/W version as a luma matte. I then used Colorama (grey ramp) and Posterized the original footage.
It is getting close to the look. But I’m sure our experts here could really make this shine.
Any ideas?
— TL
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15 Replies
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When using the Difference Matte, you don’t need to create a B/W image. The Difference Matte will create a matte, which is inherently a grayscale image.
What you may want to do is to cleanup and perhaps tighten up the matte. AE’s builtin Matte chokers should do the trick as well as Curves and Levels.
HTH
RoRKbroadcastGEMs.com – the leader in customizable royalty-free animated backdrops
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…and they won’t, because of the noise inherent in video.
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But the “Insible Man/Predator” effect doesn’t require precise edges. The Difference Matte plus possible garbage matting, cuves and levels and matte chokes on the resultant matte should do the trick.
Cheers
RoRKbroadcastGEMs.com – the leader in customizable royalty-free animated backdrops
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[Dave LaRonde] “Our original poster had mentioned being handed already-shot footage. Does it have camera motion in it? Is it hand-held? Does it arc around the subject? Can you salvage enough of the background to actually build a clean plate that would work? What about any motion blur in the background? What if it was windy? What if it’s DV, with its notoriously poor color resolution?”
I thought he said that he had a locked down shot. No?
Otherwise, you’re right for the most part. But then again because the effect doesn’t require much perspective, it may still work. It all depnds on the actual plate and the desired effect.
Cheers
RoRKbroadcastGEMs.com – the leader in customizable royalty-free animated backdrops
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q[Dave LaRonde] “If that’s the case, and you aspire to do effects work, I’d investigate another path in life.
Or perhaps you can just suck it up, acknowledge that shooting off the cuff is no way to get satisfactory effects, and start putting some thought into your shots. The people who accomplish the effects you want to emulate actually do that.”
Wow. Kinda harsh.
— TL
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Tom, it may seem hard to hear but I think Dave is more correct than not when talking about approaching a job professionally. Of course, if you’re _not_ a professional and you have no/little interest in making it completely professional then yeah, other approaches will give you some kind of result; you’ll learn something, your friends will think it’s cool, the bluebirds will sing and there will be rainbows.
But if you want to be a pro, for the long term, he’s right.
A
Vertigo Productions
https://www.vertigo.co.uk -
The truth is, if you fail to plan and plan well, you have, well … planned to fail.
Sorry to use such an overused turn of phrase but it is quite true.
You cannot expect to emulate techniques that are drawn from well planned and storyboarded, orchestrated and executed shots that are the basis of the great shots.
Just last week, Kathlyn and I had to sit with a director we are working with who wanted to shot a scene wherein an old actor’s hands get a close up and it’s seen that he has had his fingers cut off while he was in a concentration camp. Well, the guy’s hands are perfectly fine.
I had to explain to the guy that we needed to sketch out the shot. He thought it just happened by magic in post. I asked him, “How?” He couldn’t answer and so I explained what it would take to shoot the shot with markers that could be tracked, what a clean plate is, how to track a shot and why, etc., etc. — he had never done an effects shoot before (he’s a pretty sober storyteller and doesn’t do effects movies). When I was done explaining, he was pretty surprised. “That’s a lot more work than I thought it was going to be,” he said.
It always is.
Unless you want crappy results and are planning on failing.
Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net -
Oh, I agree about planning and so forth. I guess since you all don’t have all the background info, you are coming at this from the wrong angle.
Yes, I am a professional. I got my degree in 1993. I’m a corporate video producer. However, that is somewhat stifling creatively speaking. So, I have started a “film club” for actors and writers and crew to create our own passion projects on the weekends for film festival submission.
One overly zealous member came to me with preshot footage described in the original post. I’m just trying to help the kid out.
Thanks for some of the helpful info, though.
— TL
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Thanks for the explanation, it is appreciated. Sometimes, the forum gets used by those who expect to come up with WETA/ILM “just add water” effects techniques by those who don’t want to do any work to get there. (To be honest, for the ones reading this that know they do that, use the basics forum as we will extend a lot more latitude and liberty there than on this forum.)
Thanks again for the explanation, TL.
Ron Lindeboom
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No sweat. I appreciate all the Cow has to offer, so this is my one stop “how do I do that” shop. 🙂
— TL
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