How to do a huge war effect for nothing

[Joseph Nesbitt]

these guys managed to do an omaha invasion scene with three guys, although the video showed all that got put into it, I have no idea how I would do it, so can anyone go step by step and show me how it was done, some specifics I want to know are

1- photographing something like a bunker, putting into your footage and then having someone run in front of it, or rather a lot of people like in they're case and two, what program to use to get all those actors in the same frame and cut it all together like they did, is there a specific roto program or is they're a good and easy way to do it with FCP.

And is they're a better method than the way the did that, I don't have 1000 extras and 1,000,000,000 squibs but maybe some other manipulation strategies on how to achieve a similar effect.

Finally I know that they used green screen a lot, does anyone know a good web site that can explain the chroma key method step by step and really get me to the point where I could do it with no problems at all in editing? Sorry for the long post and thank you for any answers.

[Phil Rhodes]

Google can answer most of this stuff, especially about the green screen.

 

You could do most of it in FCP. I'm not sure that it comes with a motion tracker by default.

 

That stuff was quite well done - many, many days more fiddling around on computers than shooting.

 

P

[Brian Drysdale]

Also, storyboarding and pre-planning.

[Daniel Smith]

I don't get the bit nearer the end (3:03) where the camera pulls a large hand held pan/tilt.

 

I can't put it down to them cropping into the HD resolution and using the spare resolution to move the frame around to imitate the hand held affect, as it is such as huge movement.

 

The only ways I can imagine they done it is if they cleverly stitched the video together somehow to create a super HD res (somehow) and then digitally pan/tilted within that, or if they had a motion control rig (which I couldn't see listed).

 

Any ideas?

Edited April 17, 2008 by Daniel Ashley-Smith

[Andre LeBlanc]

They may have done it with a set extension in post. In other words, everything screen left looks like it could be a composited effect on top of the original plate. It's a pretty common thing, and with all the blur with this particular camera move, you could really get away with it. Not saying that's definitely how it was done... but it would be possible to do it that way.

[Will Earl]

I have a couple of ideas how the handheld moves could have been pulled off, but shooting it as panoramic tiles which can be panned and tilted is the most likely way it was done. I'm not sure of any off-the-shelf tools that do automatic stitching of video tiles, but compositing tools such as After Effects and Nuke can handle stuff like this, although it's a rather manual task (I get the feeling it's easier to do this with Nuke though).

[Markus Manninen]

That's pretty cool. Hadn't seen this one.

 

Yeah, I agree. Panoramic tiles is what it looked like. Difficult to tell how well it was done looking at it on youtube.

 

M

[Jamie Lewis]

That's a great vid. Nice find!