walking in through the gates

[Steve Roberts]

Storyboard the shot to see what you need.

You might want to shoot some tests first.

Make sure that your shots have enough resolution. In other words, if you expect to move up to the building so the door fills the frame, make sure you can get a shot of the building with enough res so the door portion is 480-540 pixels high (or so). So if the buliding is 10 times as high as the door, then your shot should be about 5000 pixels high. Yow. Now, in AE you can enlarge things to maybe 120% without too much grief, but be aware of the needed resolution.

You could also shoot stills at intervals as you move in — maybe this is best. See “in AE” below.

If you have things in shot such as lampposts along the way, they will move relative to the building as you get closer, yes? So you’ll have to remove them from shot to make that happen. It would be nice to take extra shots shifting to the side a bit to have the bits of building that would fill in the parts you have to remove.

Make sure you have no visible lighting changes between shots. Don’t shoot when the sun is coming in or out of clouds.

Try to shoot the buildings with very little tilt.

In AE, you might want to start with a full building shot, saved as a smaller file to avoid slow renders. Then you move in on it, and replace it with a closer shot. Maybe the building could be a precomp, where you dissolve from shot to shot. So you move into the precomp. Or you could move into the building full shot, but place the other shots in the same place as the building and bring them up as you get closer.

I’d shoot good shots of items along the path (lampposts, whatever), and re-insert them into the shot for perspective — we pass them along the way.

As for the room … you’d probably have to shoot each wall, ceiling and floor of the room to make a big box in AE, since they’d want to pan around the room, probably.

Regarding resolution, be prepared for slowdowns if the files are too big. If they’re too big, you can use proxies.
And you might have to add a 1-pixel blur in an adjustment layer to soften flickering fine lines.

Anybody else?

[Steve Roberts]

Oh, geez … if he wants it realistic, you’re hosed. It can only be simplified and “graphic”, not realistic in AE.

[Laurie Turner]

Thank you Steve, your comments are a huge help. I didn’t even think of the obvious such as the clouds going in and out effecting the lighting.
The deadline is not a huge deal at this point. He wants that graphic element in the production. Like instead of a video game looking real he want the real to look like a realistic video game. If you are looking at that statement a little funny, welcome to my world.
This challenge is going to be fun though. Keep it coming with the suggestions. The more thought I can put into this the easier it will be. I have a week before taking the pictures of the building, I want to be prepared.
Thank you =)

[Joe Moya]

Why not work backwards then…

Film the shot the way you want it to look… then convert the video to a cartoon/animated look.

This way, it is easier to create the subject/movement… and, the process of converting to animation becomes the work.

[Delete]

I’m just guessing, but you probably don’t have any 3d modeling experience. This could be made a ton simpler if you could use C4D or Maya.

You may want do a couple low-res versions of bits of the clip to show to your “boss” as he may not really understand the limitation imposed by AE 3D compositions. What everybody has described so far is going to turn out looking a bit like doom 1, with orient-toward-camera sprites and non-textured panels.

play with your camera setting to see if you can adjust for the sheer scale of things needed for the comp.

https://www.xonikz.com/