How’s this done?

[Shawn Miller]

“It’s also fairly obvious that there wasn’t any 3D object tracking done here.”

Oops, forgot to explain this. Object tracking would require more movement to expose more curvature of the surface… the camera movements are too flat.

I also meant to add that this might be a question better asked in the ‘compositing forums’ (AE, Nuke, Blender, etc)… AND, I believe videocopilot.com covers many of the questions you might have about an effect like this in their “Healer” tutorial (these kids give away the good stuff for free… I might be bitter if I was still freelancing). 🙂

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/the_healer/

[Mark Suszko]

Using a real projector is neat; they did that a numebr of times in those James Bond Movie title sequences. But that would require some fancy exposure tricks. Nothing is ever quite as easy as you first figure it.

[Shawn Miller]

So true, I’ve seen Michel Gondray use this technique a number of times, and I keep threatening to try it someday… but I can never justify the dev time, when I know I can do it quickly in post. 🙂

Shawn

[Mark Suszko]

Gondry is a god. If you don’t own his Drectors Series DVD, get it on your xmas gift list. VERY inspirational.

[Dennis Radeke]

Shawn is spot on. There are a variety of tools that can accomplish this for you. If you use After Effects, then be sure to utilize Mocha AE which gives you very good 2D planar tracking which is the bulk of the effect we’re talking about here. Imagineer Systems has a lot of good tutorials on their website and Andrew Kramer (https://www.videocopilot.net) also recently did a tutorial called Magic Tracking.

Hope this helps,
Dennis