[Mark Suszko]

Looking at the photographer in some of the shots, he’s got what looks like one of the new super-duper digital stills cams that are capable of shooting video, with an extreme fisheye lens. He’s tiny and it is not clear. But it leads me to wonder if he’s got some kind of meshwarp thing he does to a strip of rapid stills from the extreme fisheye footage that lets him capture with the one shot the change in perspective that it normally takes a semicircle of independent cams to get.

[Mark Suszko]

Nothing is obscure, once it gets on the internet. All it will take for that company to get sued out of business is for one of their customers to post a clip they did on YouTube or theproduction company’s own promo web site and bam, you’ve got the evidence needed for the rights holders to sue and win.

I can’t think of too many honest businesses who’s business model is: “break the law in everything you’re doing for profit and just hope you don’t get caught”. Is that the Madoff business school that teaches that?:-)

[Mark Suszko]

The effect at the very end that simulates “bullet time” might be achieved with just 2 cameras if you used a morphing plug-in, but it looks too good for that. Darn, I wish I could step-frame this flash player to get a better look. The more samples from different angles you can get, the better these 3-d matrix effect things look.

So I’m scratching my head that this was done with just one or two cams. The lens flares look fake and I expect are there to help hide where something doesn’t match well, because you don’t see them any other time in the piece in that same way.

I can imagine getting a couple angles from live footage, mapping it to a 3-d CGI model, and rotating the model and composite that in. That’s another way to fake it without using the ring of dozens (or more) of cameras.

Perhaps all it really is is shooting enough separate shots of the same move to have multiple morph targets, then just composite it back over one master shot after painting out the original surfer from that master. At least, that’s how I would think about doing it. That would be a lot of work though.

It is beautiful work, though I felt they used too much of the grad filter effects in tinting.

[Mark Suszko]

IMO, that clip was roto’ed , probably in photoshop, or keyed to cut the man and windsurf board out, then laid back over the treated backdrop video for the spin around effect. The vimeo player won’t let me step-frame it to comfirm, but that’s what it looks like to me.

[Mark Suszko]

What does the rest of the frame around the drop look like? Is it filled with a pattern or just one shade of bright or dark tone? If the latter, try changing the compositing mode from the “Modify” tab at the top of the screen. Drop on upper video track, new background below. Highlight upper track of the drop, select compositing mode, examine results. if you’re lucky, this may be all you need. BTW, there are great free clips of water elements in FCP, Motion, and Livetype, go browsing what you already have using the inspector tool, it might work for you.

[Mark Suszko]

There is previz software for this, you can choose how much money and quality you need. It can be as simple as moving clip art around in powerpoint slides, rough arrangements made with free Google Sketch-Up, or redering out a still using Poser, or a full-blown pre-viz program, several are out there, I think Toonboom makes one now. The more sophisticated/expensive ones let you simulate actual lenses, lighting, and even jib and dolly moves in storyboards as well as animatics (animated boards.) Use as much or as little as you want/need, and you don’t have to be an artist to get your ideas across.

[Mark Suszko]

They can’t. But they do it anyway. They are just rolling the dice and hoping it doesn’t come up snake eyes some day. If this is their business model, they must have flunked statistics in high school.

Australia has an interesting arrangement on copyright that should be the model when/if we ever get it changed here. I’m not optimistic though because the heaviest hitters of the entertainment industry like the current messed-up situation jsut the way it is, and regularly bribe or buy off Congress to maintain the status quo.

[Mark Suszko]

Yes, what you’d do is, if it was a still, you’d use it as a texture map onto a 3-d extruded solid. Think back to applying decals on your model cars or planes as a kid, same idea.

If you wanted it to be motion video, you can map AVI files onto a 3-d solid. And in fact Aftereffects is pretty good for this job. If you don’t have it, perhaps you can farm out this segment to someone for a small sum.

Or, you might just want to use the deal they have going at Digital Juice and buy a discounted version of Zaxworks, then you could do this yourself, and much more, any time you need it. Might want to pop over there and see the demo.

Zaxworks is for more than flying 3-d type around. If you can save out your state shape as a vector art format, Zaxworks should be able to map your pictures or video onto it. Comes in stand-alone formats for mac and PC platforms as well as an AE plug-in. If I had any after-holidays money to spend, I’d get that for myself!:-)

I’m thinking of how to fake this in Apple Motion, basically, two layers of 2-d art, keyframed the same, the top layer positioned to look like it is applied onto the single-color state shape below, using a key. If you fake a coined edge along the side of the state outline down the camera side, using photoshop, and don’t wobble the angle too much in any direction, you could maybe “fake it” and still look *kinda* 3-d. I’ve done that years ago with shapes of Illinois rendered as a 3-d still then manipulated in 2-d with warping.

I’d rather have the Zaxworks though:-)

[Mark Suszko]

What about an emboss effect on the holdout matte?

[Mark Suszko]

OK that was not helpful. Funny, but not helpful.

After seeing your first demo, I would suggest your next logical step is to forget building these in photoshop OR Aftereffects, buy real stop-mo software and get most of the work done in actual production, leaving relatively little to edit later.

On the mac, my kids really enjoy iStopmotion by Boinx software. What this has that is of use to you is that it offers onion-skinning as well as the ability to go back and re-shoot any one frame in a sequence. You can play back your movie on location on the laptop as you shoot it, and make corrections to any individual bad frames while you’re still there, seeing how the movie flows backwards and forwards. The advanced version also offers greenscreening so that you can substitute new backdrops or multiply one person or object into an army of clones, each doing something different on their own layer, but all interacting. It is also handy for trick shots like tossing a stop-mo animated ball or other object that needs to be suspended midair or something between takes.

These kinds of features are not flashy, but are important and can let you enhance storytelling, way more than cheesey laser and explosion effects can. The best effects don’t look like effects, the audience thinks they’re real.

Boinx offers free trial versions to download and play with for your mac. I urge you to try it out or just look over their galleries.

On the PC side, you might try a product called anim8tor. There are many more options at various price and feature levels.

Or go to a place like download.com or versiontracker.com and keyword search for stop-motion and time-lapse spoftware/freeware/shareware for something you can afford. Time-lapse software and stop-mo software share a lot of common functions so search both terms.

Best of luck. Animation is a lonely and tedious but ultimately very rewarding means of creative expression.