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Hit and Run help
I’m working on a project that requires a (car/pedestrian) hit and run scene. The closest thing I’ve found to what I’ll attempt is a clip on Andrew Kramer’s site https://www.yourdreamvideo.com/orange/ >Portfolio>Car Hit Scene.
Can anyone offer tips or tricks on how to composite a realistic “hit” that carries the victim out of frame? I’ll shoot the car and talent as two separate elements (unless I can talk the talent into getting hit – which would save me some time 🙂 ) What seems to work the best for isolating the talent – green screen, roto, masking?
What should I consider for a daytime shot vs. a night shot in terms of isolating talent in the comp?
This is my first attempt at this effect, any help would be graciously received!
Thanks – P
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6 Replies
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Can you shoot against a green screen? If you have a portable one (12′ x12′) you should be able to do it quite easily. That way you can have the same lighting conditions , if you plan on shooting on location. Just make sure to shoot a good background plate.
We did some location shooting with a green screen, my first time, just recently. It turned out fine. Just make sure that if it’s out side that you try to shoot the elements as close together as you can, in time i mean. You want to keep a consistant light. Don’t shoot one element with cloud and the other no clouds. Try and pick one or the other.
When compositing, motion blur will help go along ways in selling it. and just keyframing the motion of the talent out.
I agree with the time saver though, if they would just agree to get hit it would save you tonnes of time.
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Thanks for the suggestions, I do have a small-ish green screen I could take on location so I’ll try that. Great idea using the harness although I think for this project I’ll have to rely on motion keyframes and some imagination fom the talent.
After looking the (above example) site again, he has a “compositing reel” that has the car hit sequence split into elements. The colorization of the final helps sell the effect, but I’d have a hard time rotoscoping against such a dark background. Any guesses how he isolated the talent in that sequence, my guess is an animated soft edge mask – but what do I know?
Thanks!
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Looking at his reel portion actually helped quite a bit, instead of just focusing on the final product. Because that part of the sequence is so short, it actually wouldn’t be too tough to remove the subject by hand, and then motion blur him out of there. If it’s not a night shot, I’ve had pretty good luck shooting a scene with no action in it, then using that (with a garbage matte) to make a key by inverting it. There will be some work either way, but to my eye it looks like it would be only 10 frames or so to make it convincing. You could also add other elements by having your actor fall (you don’t have to show what he falls onto to get the motion impact). Good luck – I’d like to see the final outcome!
Rhett -
I remember a uk road safety ad which had startling impact. A child ran away from the camera and into the road. A car came into the shot and I can’t remember the exact details but something happened, perhaps a pigeon took off, obscuring the action and they used this as cover for replacing the boy with a crash test dummy. The dummy was dressed as the boy had been and seeing the dummy hit with full force was shocking.
I havent seen the ad for years but it obviously left a lasting impression for both road safety and creative reasons.
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Rhett, my thoughts exactly.
2 other things I tried to do is rotate the charachter forward (counterclockwise) to make it seem like he is shoved forward. Then put a little bit of camera shake to make it more impactful and of course good’ol motion blur.
Also just off camera is the car driving forward so that his pants light up as the approach is made.
Remember to lock the camera down on a good tripod.
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when I was in school we did a fake hit and run by locking down the camera, having the car drive by then having the actor walk through the scene, then we put a dummy that was just made of long handled underwear and straw and the actors pants and shirt in the road where the actor had been when he was in the middle of the street and then the car ran over the dummy.
We just did a wipe between the actor and the car footage just cutting off the left edge of the actor shot and showing the right side of the car shot, and then cut to the shot of the car hitting the dummy at the right time. It was amazingly effective especially when the next shot was a closeup of our actor falling to the street wearing the dirty and ripped up cloths that we took off the dummy. He actually only lifted his back about 4 inches off the pavement and then kind of convulsed. The dummy didn’t even have a head, hands, or shoes, but nobody noticed because of the visual shock of the impact and the blur as the dummy went flying. Folks were congratulating the guy we shot for his amazing stunt work and were amazed that he took the hit from the car. None of us ever told how we did the shot and i
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