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Reflections on a wine glass
Hi all:
This is a shot that we’re planning for a video at work: it’s outdoors. A woman is holding a wine glass in front of her. We have a close-up of the wine glass, and on it we see the reflection of a guy who is in front of the woman (but who doesn’t appear otherwise in the frame). A variant of this would be: we see the wine glass in the foreground, and we see through it, distorted, a couple behind the glass, several meters away.
How would you guys plan and composite these shots? I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think it would be too hard: you’d just have to shoot the main shot with the wine glass, and then shoot whatever you want reflected/distorted, and then composite them in After Effects, using Spherize or some other filter in the “Distort” section to achieve the distortion, and then playing wth composite modes/opacity/color correction to integrate both shots and achieve the “reflected/distorted in glass” look. Am I on the right track, or is there something else I’m not foreseeing?
Thanks in advance.
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2 Replies
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A few things:
If at all possible tell your DP to use a Polaroid filter so you have less reflections on the wine-glass to start with (you will need a lot more light though).
I’m absolutely baffled that Videographers use this tool so little. OK, it’s weird when you do massive pano’s with a lot of sky in the picture, but how many crappy no-contrast ‘through-the-windshield’- pictures have you seen ?Second: put a bright white or green tracking dot marker on the glass so you have a precise tracking point. Masking this out will be absolutley trivial compared to accurately tracking the glass if you have no reference.
Make sure the reverse shot camera’s eyelevel is in accordance with the position, especially the height the glass was at, possibly even looking up or down at where the previous camera position/height was.
If you can get a reference shot (without polaroid) of how a grid around/next to the camera distorts in the wineglass, it will help tweaking your spherize or distort.
Keeping this in mind, I think that compositing it in would be reasonably easy.
Don’t overdo the opacity, unless you want it to look like an excercise in M.C. Escher’s sketchbook or POVray 😉 -
Thanks a lot for answering, this helps a lot.
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