Compositing

[Joe Riggs]

Hello,

So there's a couple of scenes in this short, that are rather advanced for me.

1. We want this monster to climb a wall and end up on a vaulted ceiling like this .

The shot is static so we shot a plate of the empty ceiling and took some measurements, but what do I do on the greenscreen set? How do I have actor move, and camera positioned/angled to make this come together in the composite.


2. There's a part where a person with a flashlight comes across the monster and the monster moves toward them. So the light from the flashlight illuminates the monster.

We shot a few plates, as we were not sure which would be best, we shot one with flashlights on the background and one without.

So we have a few options on the greenscreen and I'm not sure what will be best for the composite. Just to be clear we don't see the actual flashlights in the composite, just the light from them.

1. shoot the actor with flashlights, and composite him into the plate without flashlights.
2. shoot the actor without flashlights, and composite him into the plate with flashlights.
3. shoot the actor and flashlights separately.
4. cgi the flashlights?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[dan kessler]

Is your monster a human actor or a CG character?

If it's CG, you don't need greenscreen at all.
Just use your plates as reference, build a CG set from
the measurements you took to provide surfaces for your
character, then animate on top of them.

If it's human, seems to me you have some problems.
Are you going to build a greenscreen set to match
the plate? Even if you do, how is your human actor
going to climb up to the ceiling? Shots where people
appear to climb the walls are usually done on big
"hamster wheel" rigs.

[Joe Riggs]

yes, it's human. I figured it would be an issue. What if instead of crawling we have the monster just on the wall, like he is hanging from it or attached to it, how would this be done on the greenscreen? Could we use a flat surface and angle the camera?

 

Thanks

[dan kessler]

I would try keeping the actor on the ground surface,
but I think angling the camera would work, both for the
wall and ceiling effects. Pay close attention to your lighting
and camera angles and continuity. You'll have to piece it
all together in the comp, but with careful planning, it just
might work.

[Jathavan Sriram]

Don't forget to shoot distortion grids of the lenses you used for plates. At best always ask the 1st/2nd AC to shoot those for all the lenses at the day of packing - and then take notes what lens was used on the shot. Also ask Script/Continuity to note down this kind of information.