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Stacked Layers Solution?
Hello,
I have been asked to provide a :20 video shot of an cubicled office, seen high and wide, ceiling included. The shot will be from a locked-down tripod. During the shot, many cubicles will be seen to illuminate from within, and a light from within the cubicle will illuminate the ceiling right above it with a corporate logo. We are thinking of using a leko-type light with a special gobo (with the client’s logo) inserted, to act as the “magic light.” Now, how best to show say, a succession of a dozen of these lit-up cubicles and logo-splashed ceilings in the edit, where the effect is cumulative and all dozen are lit by the end of the shot? Here’s one scenario: With a locked-down camera I shoot the office with the first illuminated cubicle for 30 seconds. I pause the tape and move just the light to another cubicle, and shoot for another thirty seconds. I repeat this procedure until I have a dozen cubes lit. In the edit, it might be simply a matter of building up a dozen layers each composed of a separate cubicle, and cropping each shot so that only the cube that is lit in that shot is revealed. Anyone have any other methods? And what if two cubes are not in a line that is easily cropped into a rectangle? Do you see any cautions you would like to warn me about in advance? -
5 Replies
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Brian,
Essentially what you describe could work, moving the light/gobo. But, what could be problematic is any ambient or local light shifts, even little ones which could happen with moving all the crap and lights you’d have to move. Kinda tricky. You’d have to make sure no outside light can be part of the shot. Also that your grips don’t touch ANYTHING that you see in the shot.
Personally I think I’d do the logo projection in post, you can corner pin each to match the perspective of each area. Then you could do whatever you want with them.
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Consider something like this:
Lock down the camera and do your finest exposure for the scene normally lit. Do a few more full-length shots with it stopped down 1, 2, 3 stops in case you end up needing that. Keep the ceiling on the dark side; for that matter keep everything on the dark side.
Now shut down every light source in the place, including windows (ah, that could be the hard part). Set up your projection over each cubicle (never mind, that’s probably the hard part), and run it for 30 seconds.
Do the same for however you’re going to do these “glows”, in eash cubicle. Get a few stops difference here too.
Now you theoretically can do an additive composite of whatever logos and lit-up cubicles you want in post. You shouldn’t need to do any masking, though you’ll need to pay attention to how much the glow in one cubicle spoils the ceiling over other cubicles.
Now in retrospect I would think about doing the same thing except do it with stills. More tweaking in less time, and extra resolution will allow a camera move if you want it.
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And in retrospect I agree with Chris on doing the logos in post. The project really becomes fairly simple and much more controllable then.
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I like your idea of doing the different exposures and keeping the room dark to maximize the contrast between the lit and unlit cubicles. But your phrase “additive composite”
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To be hones I haven’t done this in FCP, but play around with right-click on clip, Composite Mode, and anything but Normal. “Lighten” might actually be the most relevant, iof not a simple composite (“normal”) blend. THe idea being, if you can, to only add light to the background “plate” where it goes over a threshold. Not sure if that’s the right approach or not.
But as mentioned I’m pretty sure I’d be doing this with stills and in PhotoShop. Another benefit is that if the details are beyond you, there are more local PhotoShop geniuses to help you out than FCP ones.
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