wall of lights

[Michael Szalapski]

Making a wall of lights in cg is very easy depending on the level of realism to which you aspire.
Simply making a pattern in Photoshop of balls (or using one of several different AE plugs to do similar) and applying a stylize>glow effect on an adjustment layer would do the trick if you just needed simple.
Of course, your talent (I assume you’ve got some singer or something) would have to be on a green screen and everything might not look perfect, but it’d be interesting. If you do have your talent on a green screen make sure you’ve got a lot of backlight on them, but keep her/his/its face a little on the dark side or it’ll be very obvious you’re faking the lights.

If you want real lights there are many places that rent them (you’d have to check your local area) or you could just build one yourself, but I’m not good enough to walk you through that.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Yarim Machado]

I did a music video with a similar idea and I got a great result. You will have the best of the results if you shoot it completly on stage… If you are looking for a realistic effect, you can play with flares and not be limited with camera angles and moving the camera, looks better and its a lot cheaper. If your doing this live, dont use a green screen. Flares will contaminate the green.

If you are intending to have a more fantasy look do it cgi. I did it this way because we wanted to add motion graphics behind the performers. We shot it on a green screen. Remember to put motion trackers if you intend to move the camera but i recommend that you move it as less as possible if youre in a tight budget. You can immitate lighting effects in after effects with flares and radial blurs and so on but make them look real is not an easy task specially if you have more than a hundred shots like i did.
You can see the video here.
https://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=57417834

Good Luck!

[Derrick]

Hi there Yarim,

I really like the effect you have on the footage behind them when they’re on stage, I’m trying to do something similar, I’ve tried all night to create that look playing with CC Ball, glow, etc… but can’t get it.

would you mind to please maybe just give the low down on how to achieve that?

I’d really appreciate it!

thanks for your time,
Derrick

[Aviles Candido]

Hello, I been trying to find a tutorial for the wall of lights and I haven’t yet. But if you do or I do I’ll let you know where.

[Michael Szalapski]

Considering that this thread is over a year and a half old, I would suggest posting a new thread with a link to this old one.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.