He Was a Quiet Man speed effects – how?

[Collin Alexander]

I haven’t seen “Quiet Man”, but I’ll bet it was a composite. I’m guessing they shot the street footage, time-remapped it. Then shot the actor against green screen trying to match where and how he needed to go to fit the footage.

[Collin Alexander]

Or, if all the background people and cars were extras, and you could completely clear the streets, you could shoot the actor walking on empty streets with nothing moving. If you kept the cameras in place and shot everything twice, once with all the extras and once with just the actor, that would work.

[Mark Fogarty]

I’m not sure if it’s practical or not for your situation, but you could have your actor walk very slowly down the sidewalk while everybody else moves at real time… then in post you speed up the footage and add some effects that Eran Stern talks about in this tutorial.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/stern_eran/Time_FX.php

The challenge would be for the actor to walk that slowly yet smoothly so it looks natural when sped up.

Mark Fogarty
Media Missionary
Muddy River Media
http://www.MuddyRiverMedia.org

[Scott Heydinger]

Assuming that I could shoot twice, once with the main actor and once with extras, how would I merge the images?

A simple average wouldn’t work – the moving parts would only contribute to half of the final work and look like ghosts. Any suggestions on how to blend the two clips?

Thanks!

[Michael Szalapski]

I did this very same effect on a short film last year. As mentioned previously we did a composite. Luckily for me our shot had the actor running on a pedestrian bridge over a road. The only difficult part was standing in the middle of the road for 10 minutes to get the footage of the cars without me dying.

I just used masks to cut out the bridge where our actor was running (that layer was the slow mo) and put it over the road layer where everything was in fast motion.

In your case, if you have your actor walking by a street, you could do rotoscoping. Shoot the actor walking, then shoot your background. That way the lighting and angles are right for your actor. The only problem with this is that rotoscoping is very tedious. If you’ve never done it before…prepare yourself. You could also bring a portable green screen.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Frank Cappello]

Well I can answer this since i did the effects myself. Actually there was no split composite with speeded up traffic. What I did was pick frames from the footage that had no cars and stitched it together to form a clear emoty road. Then I just animated 3D cars and buses, etc in lightwave and comped them in. No cars were real at all.