Tron

[Will Cavanagh]

Shoot your actors with chroma-keyable paint wherever you want them to glow. Then use a solid below your (keyed) footage to add the color. If you want some variation in brightness you could use a fractal noise effect on the solid with a hue/saturation below set to colorize to make it a bright color again. Set the contrast fairly low on your fractal noise layer. You can try playing with adding a wiggle() expression to the contrast, evolution, and brightness properties of the fractal noise layer to make the glow feel more dynamic.

If you want to have the suit glow, set up your comp as described above, but set the solid to an alpha inverted trackmatte on the footage layer. Then add a duplicate of the footage layer below. Then you can just add a glow effect to the solid, and have the glow overflow the edges of the chroma key. You may need to precomp your solid before setting it to glow (I’m not in front of AE and I don’t remember how glow fits into the OoO in AE.)

[Corey Coker]

thanks very much

[David Bogie]

You might be able to find the original articles from American Cinematographer. They used, if memory serves, two techniques: fluorescent paints with heavy UV lighting on the set and retroreflective items (I don’t think prismatic fabrics were available back then) lit by a camera-mounted instrument.

bogiesan

[Will Cavanagh]

Sounds cool, but expensive… And hard to change in post if it doesn’t look right or if you need to “emote” with it. Would love to see the article nonetheless if anyone has a link.

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