[Thomas Wood]

Hi Dale and Creative Cow’ers,

All great ideas on how we achieved the final effect. Right on the money with LED’s on the wheel. We tried a couple of different setup’s, but stick-on strips with battery packs taped to the spokes worked the best.

Thankfully the light trails were not all done in post, but in camera, 2 cameras to be precise. We had a Sony FS700 and a Nikon D800 rigged on a straight bar as close together as possible. While the Sony captured the video, the Nikon was set for a long exposure. After a bit or trial and error, we got the timing and exposure technique dialed.

In After Effects I used the puppet tool on the long exposure plate to morph and compensate for the parallax shift of the 2 cameras. With the video plate as a guide, I could match the path’s of the wheel from both assets. Then, using a rough luminance key and various rotoscoping techniques (tracking and keyframing) I revealed the light trail as the rider crossed the frame.

With some simple color correction to maximize the light effect, we had the finished product.

We are working on a full behind the scenes write up with more detail.

Tom Wood – VFX creator for Light Cycles
https://www.thomas-wood.co.uk