locking off background and fading characters in and out

[David Eells]

My take on this is that the challenges are more along the lines of keeping the camera rock solid, keeping your lighting consistent, and controlling your shadows. If you do all that, the dissolving in and out is easy stuff. You could do it in After Effects, but it might be quicker and easier in an NLE.

Hope that helps.

[Tristan Tumble]

the trick is, picking your background wisely.

if there are cars passing trough, and people, then eventough the cam is locked off, when you fade your people in and out, whatever is behind them at the time will fade with them (Cars/ppl/whatever)
so try the keep your background as clean as possible, an open field, a wall…stuff like that.

[Steve Roberts]

… and shoot the visual equivalent of “room tone”: the background with nothing going on in front of it.

… and keep and eye on moving tree branches, garbage, birds, the location of the sun, and so on.

.. and be mindful of sound when you do these dissolves, if that’s applicable to your show.

[Michael Duff]

and clocks……remember to take the battery out

[Michael Szalapski]

If it’s in grass don’t forget the wind is gonna make a mess of the grass.
Oooh, also watch out for footprints/peopletrails in the grass/dirt/whatever.
Watch the sky for clouds.

Dang, this isn’t gonna be as easy as it sounded.

So long as Mother Nature doesn’t mess with you too much it should be a lot of fun, you might try using masks along with keyframing the opacity to give a slightly more interesting look to the fades. You could also use fractal noise precomps as track mattes. For some bizarre reason I’m really liking this project, I wish I were doing it. So many ideas, so little time.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great)

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