weapon flashlight

[Jeffrey Kaplan]

You’ll likely need to use a 3D tracker (like Buju or PF Track) then import your tracking data into a 3D program where you’ll model / texture / light / & animate your flashlight. Lastly, you’ll bring your 3D render into AE for composite! If you don’t know how to do all that – re-shoot!

Jeff Kaplan
Point 360 WEST
Animation & VFX Department
http://www.point360west.com

[Chris Wright]

Dave is right, by the time you 3-D solve, learn a 3-d program, make an awesome looking cgi flashlight model, you could have re-shot the take and still have saved a lot of time/money. Cgi is almost never cheaper. Even the new predator movie is going for less cgi.

https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/

[Efi Or]

ok ok, lets forget from the flashlight device.
I still can use spotlight and LUX, and to parent it to the m-16, right?
the spotlight effect cant be done in the movie, only in the AE, no?

Dave, you said ill need to re-shoot the footage, so ok, lets say i will –
but what should i do while filming my movie again?
simply to add flashlight on the m-16 and THEN film again?
saving me the trouble to add it in AE, right?

thank you all guys for all the help.

[Jeffrey Kaplan]

Tape the flashlight onto the M-16 for sure. For the sake of an easy motion track you may want to get a vibrant piece of green tape or a sticker to place on the end flashlight (make sure you can see the sticker in frame). In addition, you may want to shoot all of your “first person” gun moves in front of a green screen (if you are wearing camo use a blue screen). That will prevent you from doing a great deal of gun / flashlight rotoscoping (you need that gun and flashlight to be a foreground object separate from the background so you can composite that light between the two).

-Good Luck

Jeff Kaplan
Point 360 WEST
Animation & VFX Department
http://www.point360west.com

[Efi Or]

thank you.
btw, rotoscoping is quit simple with cs5, with the rotobrush.

[Michael Szalapski]

Put the flashlight on your gun in real life. No question.
When you say “the spotlight effect cant be done in the movie, only in the AE, no?” I assume you mean that you can’t see the beam of light when you’re shooting and you want that beam effect like you always see in tv shows and film. Doing this in After Effects will be very time-consuming. Get a fog machine or find some other way of fogging up the air a bit and you’ll have that beam effect.

– 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.

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Now this might just be me, but if you taped the camera on the M16, that means the gun will always be in the same place in the frame and everything else moves. If that is so, why would you need to track the M16? And getting a flash light on should be easy- all you need is a still of a flashlight which you can take with any digital camera. Then add the light and Lux. However, this will not create shadows moving on the objects in your frame- so re-shoot with a powerful light attached to your M16, and add light and lux in post for beam.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist
Bucharest, Romania
http://www.ennstudio.ro