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lsgl: reverse engineering perspective
May 3, 2007
lsgl: crossing shot 2
by sven at 11:20 pm
No more lollygagging -- back to work on the film!
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Got my second new shot in the can today. This is part of a three-shot sequence that shows the explorers crossing the cave and discovering the distress beacon.
My first shot shows that the explorers are dwarfed by the Elders. The second shot gives a sense of how crowded the hive is.
Also, importantly, I have the explorers walking between foreground and background plates. The purpose of this is to help place them in the environment. Due to time constraints, I can't have any light or shadows emanating from the lavamen. Having the perspective correct, and occassionally having them step behind things is going to have to suffice.
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Here's the background plate that I rendered out of LightWave.
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Here's the foreground plate. In PhotoShop, I used the alpha layer to select the negative space and delete it, leaving a transparent area.
In AfterEffects, I sandwiched the footage of my actors between the foreground and background plates.
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Depth of field effects take a long time to render. Today I discovered the trick of setting render resolution in LightWave to "quickshade." The quickshade version of the background plate took 1 min 33 sec to render -- as opposed to the "realistic" version, which took 7 min 3 sec. It's not as informative as I'd like -- but quickshade is still a useful tool when I have to do a lot of tests.
I'm still refining my process for compositing. Here's the latest checklist:
- AfterEffects: finalize the pace of the actors' shot
- AfterEffects: remove digital spatter
- AfterEffects: render out an RGBA .mov file
- LightWave: load the .mov file into the "compositing > foreground" window
- LightWave: pose the lavamen stand-ins
- LightWave: place the camera relative to the stand-ins (checking against the foreground)
- LightWave: parent the camera and lavaman 2 to lavaman 1
- LightWave: place the Elders and cave
- LightWave: hide the lavamen, render out a .psd file
- AfterEffects: check to see how the shot looks when combined with actors and color-corrected
- LightWave: make adjustments in positions and lighting as necessary
- LightWave: if depth of field effect is needed, add it now
- LightWave: render out the final .psd file
- LightWave: if there are foreground elements, render their .psd file out separately
- PhotoShop: if there's a foreground plate, delete the negative space
- AfterEffects: assemble background, foreground, and actor layers
- AfterEffects: do standard color-correction; adjust as necessary
posted by sven | May 3, 2007 11:20 PM | categories: let sleeping gods lie