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Advice for bullet-shot (as featured on vcp).
Hello there everyone.
I’m not sure if anyone here can help me, but I thought I’d give it a go. I’m sure many of you are famaliar with VideoCoPilot and I’m really looking forward to Andrew’s new ‘Advanced Training DVD’ which features a ‘bullet’ tutorial. (see footage here : https://www.videocopilot.net/blogstuff/bullet_hd.mov). As soon as I saw this, I wrote my entire major production (I’m a video degree student at Bournemouth) to include a shot very samaliar to this.
Now, Andrew has recently announced, that the DVD won’t be out until May 20th, however, I’ve got to film on May 10th/11th/12th of May.
I’ve tried emailing the email lines at VCP, I’ve tried replying to his blog several times, but for whatever reason (maybe he’s too busy) I’ve not heard back.
Now, on with my question, how would you go around the physical filming on a shot like this? Would you assume there are any limitations/restrictions to the angle of the shot, the speed of the pan etc etc etc? I really could do with some advice.
Thanks guys,
-Dave -
2 Replies
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[David May] “Now, on with my question, how would you go around the physical filming on a shot like this? Would you assume there are any limitations/restrictions to the angle of the shot, the speed of the pan etc etc etc? I really could do with some advice. “
I theorized in another thread that there is no real camera pan involved in that shot. My theory is that it’s a series of stitched together plates (one with a live actor) and a virtual camera pan. The benefit of this is that the shot with the actor in it is locked down during shooting and when creating the bullet & its wake. That should simplify the process of matching the bullet’s motion to the stitched background plates.
The virtual pan should look pretty good. There is extremely little parallax in the real world when panning, so the fact that there is no parallax in the virtual pan should go unnoticed, and Andrew does a good job of blurring the background to sell the shot.
You should definitely record camera information when shooting, such as the height from the ground, any angles involved due to a tilt, the focal length and the distance to your subject. These provide most of the information you should need to match the perspective of the shot in your composite.
As always, test this before you actually get your actors/crew together to iron out the kinks and make sure the technique will work (after all, this is just me theorizing).
As for modeling and rendering the bullet, that’s not really my department, but you will probably want an HDR light probe to make the specular reflections on the bullet realistic. The complexity of this shot will be in animating the camera move and matching it from the 3D application to AE, so make sure you’re comfortable with the import/export of camera data.
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Hey Darby I noticed that you live in Santa Cruz. I don’t meet many people that live in my area but I live in Scotts Valley. Nice to meet you fellow VFX friend. I went to your website and saw some of your reels. It was a lot better than I expected. You can see some of my work at youtube.com/cigotie if you want to. I’m not sure if this is the correct way to contact you but just wanted to say hello.
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