TV Flicker Projection

[Ken Latman]

Harry Frank over at http://www.graymachine.com has a preset for bad TV that might be what your looking for.

[Robyn Rhodes]

wiggle the intensity property of the light

I’m only half the thing I say I am, the other half are me.

[William J. meyer]

Hi Brian,

Trying to imagine the shot as you described…

…you’re trying to recreate the flicker of TV light against the actor, as well as the shadow on the back wall…

…I think I would cut out the actor and the chair using masks in order to create an empty wall without the constant shadow you mentioned (perhaps I would use Photoshop’s clone tool on a still frame from the footage, or find a free texture map online), and then likewise create a mask of the shadow that you did shoot. So, I’m suggesting three layers. Top layer: masked actor, chair and foreground. Middle layer: masked shadow. Bottom layer: New, empty wall.

Now you can control the shadow’s exposure, etc with color correction filters and try-out the wiggle expression on its opacity.

I think you can get decent results depending on the accuracy of your masks.

As far as the flicker of light on the rest of the scene, I’d try an adjustment layer with the Exposure filter and use the expression pickwhip to connect its strength to whatever you’ve keyframed or expressioned on the aforementioned shadow layer.

I’m just brainstorming.

take care, wjm

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[Chris Wright]

animate a gamma shift, that’s what expensive plugins do. Take some footage to use for TV light flicker, keyframe gamma shifts, then use a small opacity luma transfer to an adjustment layer and put over man. yay!

[Chris Wright]

shadows are a problem, very true, when light strobe gets brighter, shadows get sharper and darker.

only do this technique if the shadow with flicker effect still doesn’t look right, shadow doesn’t move too much, or you don’t care about hard rotoscoping if it does.-

feather mask the shadow, duplicate keyframes from a sharp bright to a blurry darker to match the flicker. That will help sell the shot. Only you can decide it it’s worth a reshoot.

[Todd Morgan]

You could also try animating the levels with wiggler…

[Brian Stenson]

Thanks for all the suggestions guys.
I played around with a little bit of gamma as well as color correction and worked the opacity with the wiggler which gave me a satisfactory result. As mentioned it would be a lot easier to do on set, but it takes alot less time to say we will fix it in post then to try and sort it out then and there. Well that how diectors think anyhow!!

Cheers,

Brian

[Chris Wright]

Maybe it looks really good. you are a monument to the success of this website. Please post 5 seconds of video on a host for us to see. I am, and the rest of us, very curious.

[Laura Murray]

Hey Brian,

I’m wanting to achieve a similar effect (I’m a student filmmaker and it simply didn’t occur to me to make the tv flicker while I was shooting… not going to make that mistake again!! And as I’m a student, I have no time or money to reshoot)

Aftereffects is very new to me and I’m extremely unskilled in this program.
Is it hard to achieve this effect? Especially for someone with no experience?

Cheers,
Laura

[Jason Flor]

I know the OP is old but for those researching this subject I’ll add a technique I used which saves having to mess around in post.

Rent a low cost video projector, like they use in schools and offices.

If the TV is in the shot with the camera behind it pointing at the actor put the projector on a table in front of the actor pointing at him in a way it is hidden…you could for instance frame out the table legs.

Hook the projector up to a laptop and put in a DVD with maybe an action movie so the intensity of image flickers a lot. Now, get a light spun lighting gel semi transparent and put it in front of the projector lens. This allows you to see the flickering on the actor’s face without actually projecting a picture onto him or her. The gel diffuses the image just enough for the effect. Move the projector toward or away from the actor depending on how much light intensity you want.

If you want to light up a whole room rather than just the actor’s immediate area rent a bigger projector with more Lumen output. Works great.