ATT Commercial – how’d they do it?

[Mark Suszko]

Sorta. You can do it with simple chrioma keying if you keep the layers separate enough, but if you want a little more interactivity and messign around in z-space, you shoot this with a motion-control rig that can duplicate moves and timing precisely. Shoot the background action, then the foreground action, roto the foreground person and make your composite.

[Steve Johnson]

I didn’t think about a motion control setup. I’ve seen one of those in use before. Really cool stuff. I think that’s the only way they could have done that commercial effectively. A chroma key’d actor would be a very poor way of duplicating the effect I’m thinking of. The talent in the shot could in both takes come through the same door, for all practical purposes, at different times. I suppose you could rotoscope some footage over an original plate, but the depth of field and angles of your shots would not be the same with a handheld rig between takes. and the talent would be all over the place unless you figured some way to properly stabilize the chroma’s position on the background. I’ll bet they used some sort of computer controlled camera, then did a difference matte or a careful matte process to overlay one take on the other.

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