Stars and Visors

[Scott Novasic]

Id need a lot more detail to advise on the astronaut visor. Are we looking “through” the visor? or is the astronaut floating in space?

If your ‘faking’ it I would simply make a 3d visor and have the visor reflect an environmental reflection. The reflection would be whatever starry background was chosen as the background. Then composite in AE.

Starry backgrounds, again, all depends on whether you need a 360 degree capability or not. Hi resolution photography can look good if you match the grain well, there are good 3d solutions if your a hi end user of one of the big 3d packages. Sorry im not more specific, just not enough to go on…

SuperNova
Animation & Visual Effects
Scott Novasic
Los Angeles Ca
web:https://web.mac.com/finaleffects

[Mark Suszko]

Wow, adding the visor in post is a lot of work: you need to motion track the whole shot and apply 3-d moves to the visor object, plus mask a lot of the edges. Might have saved a lot of time and money by using a polarizer on the lens when shooting with the visor, like you do when shooting thru car windshields, but that’s all behind us now. When shooting reflective stuff, you need to remember angle of incidence=angle of reflection: if you put the light at 45 degrees, the reflection should bounce off and past your lens that’s at 90 degrees, out of shot, if you are inside or outside the 45 degree bounce line with the lens, and have a black board or cloth on the opposite 45 dgree line facing the lens.

Making “space” is easy, using 2-d paint, photoshop, or throwing 2-d NASA free photos onto a 3-d cylinder in Aftereffects or a 3-d CGI program like Lightwave. In Photoshop you can start with the clouds filter and tweak the contrast until all that are left are dots… stars. Star Trek Next Generation started out by green screening a lot of starfield shots in the backgrounds of window shots, but actually found it was faster and cheaper and looked just as good to put black cloth with reflective glitter bits otuside the windows in later episodes, where they weren’t doing “warp drive”. Putting the black spangles cloth on a revoling pillar or belt added subtle “orbital” motion.

What I feel most people get wrong in faking spacewalk type footage is in not considering the light sources. If your shot is in low Earth orbit, like the shuttle or space station, you have very bright, harsh, directional light from the sun on the day side, as well as blue-tinged earthshine reflections, and these move by from left to right in less than an hour, like time-lapse sunrise/sunset on earth. In deep space, you have just starlight and it is exceptionally dim, essentially you are in a coal mine, and light is just what’s reflected off a ship hull or what’s coming from electric lights on the suit or the hull. Worse, there is no beam scattering in vacum, you don’t get the spooky cones of light like in terrestrial footage using fog. You just see the point source of the flashlight, and the disc of the other end of the beam, playing over the target object: no visible beam in between.

If you’re on the way to Mars, for example, the sun is tiny and weak like a 20-watt bulb from across the room. Objects are seen more by how they occult or block the star background, and by whatever rim light defines an edge, than by direct observation.

But in typical hollywood shots, everything in space has perfect 3-point lighting, even on the dark side:-)

[Adam Palmer]

Thanks guys for your input,
maybe if I told you a bit more about the story. Its a guy who originally we believe him to be an astronaut, but it turns out he is just an actor pretending on a set. There’s more to it, but its not relevant.
The reason why I need to use the green screen is that the whole point of it is the reveal that he’s in a studio is when the background turns off and is left with the green screen instead.
As for the visor, there’s mainly close up shots looking in, through at the face, the fact that we see the face is important in the script as it displays the main emotion of the piece.
So far I used something I got off of an Andrew Kramer tutorial about making a window in a car and filtered it with a fish eye warp to make it look more curved. Its ok, but I don’t know if there’s anything else I can do to make it just a bit more realistic.
If you need to know anything else, please tell me
Adam