Cinematography and Visual Effects

[jadoo]

I am a visual effect artist. I want to know more about cinematography, how usefull its it in terms of visual effect, How to get more info about film stock, lense,lighting, framing and so.

 

What are the things u require if u supervise a shoot say so for chroma or for wireremoval. What are the things to be taken care.

 

 

thanks

[Leon Rodriguez]

The thing I'm most concerned about is, in no particular order, First, edges. So I generally want to shoot as fine a grain as I can and shoot it so that I don't burn off the fine grain. Kodak used to make a special effect film, a 200T but now the Vision films seem to work as well. (haven't shot the 5218 on a composite yet, but I'm dying to)

Secondly I want the chromakeyed area (usually a screen) to be as evenly lit as possible so my compositer can key with as tight a noche as possible. (I don't do wire removal shots thus far). The third consideration is to know what is the post production tool that I'm going into, in other words what programs do you, the SFX guy, have to do the compositing with? Fourth, I want to keep the key color off and out of the shot. i.e. Don't let the actor wear a shirt with any green in it if it's a green screen. Or put the screen too close and get spill from the screen on everything. Seems like common sense but, well, there it is.

 

I'm not the expert but I get a fair amount of those shots every year. My expectation is that this will only continue to grow. Young directors think intuitively in SFX terms to solve shot issues as opposed to solving the problem in the practical realm. One of the (many) enjoyable things about Tim Burton's 'Big Fish' picture is that he shot so many practical solutions, like the field of yellow flowers and the size differences between people by lens proximity and the motorcycles in the spherical cage were all practical solutions and you could tell they were. I noticed that it left me with a good feeling for some reason. I think SFX is important and has it's place, and I love learning more and more about it, but it's enjoyable to solve the shot problem in front of the lens too.

[Michael Nash]

There are entire books written about visual effects cinematography -- we can discuss things at length here, but we'll never be able to exhaust the subject.

 

Regarding the specific questions of green screen and wire removal, there are still a lot of details to cover.

 

Chroma shooting: keep the blue/green screen evenly lit, and take steps to avoid the colored light bouncing onto or reflecting off the foreground objects. There are lots of little tips and tricks for this depending on the subject photographed. In general you want to keep a sharp edge on your foreground objects, which means keeping things in focus and using no diffusion filters. Focus blurs and diffusion are better done in post in this case.

 

You'll also want to match image characteristics of foreground plates and background plates as much as possible, in terms of contrast, color, grain structure and so on. Usually it's best to shoot the foreground element as clean, sharp, and fine-grained as possible so that texture and color can be finessed in post.

 

Camera angles and focal lengths need to match the background. Lighting needs to match and even be interactive to help "sell" the comp. The list of considerations goes on and on...

 

Wire removal: I know less about this but I've been told by effects people it's best to work at as high a resolution as possible (say, 35mm>HD compared to miniDV origination). The idea is that there's more info to help isolate and replace the wire. But that's at the post end...