Giant Woman Compositing

[digitalskylight]

Hey everyone,

My fiancee is looking to create a short composite for her class final, and landed on having a giant girl walk around the city (a la 50 ft woman).

Buddy Lee "Don't Flinch"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aYR_MUH7H8

Clark's "Stand Tall"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zx-MQHoP6w

I'm going to help her out with the shooting aspect, but we're having a hard time figuring out exactly how to shoot this stuff and there aren't many behind-the-scenes tutorials on this type of stuff (it's also a lot of combing through a bizarre fetish world like you wouldn't believe).

We're shooting on the 5D Mark III with a green screen, and have things storyboarded out, and have a rough idea of trying to match angles etc., but can't seem to exactly hammer down what needs to be done. We can't even use any monitoring system to ensure things match up because there doesn't seem to be any available system compatible with the 5D.

Any advice would be great!

[Michael Carter]

The Lee Jeans spot was just a clever us of stills and footage, but generally a locked-down shots look (at least judging from that tiny youtube version). Once the camera starts moving, you get into crazy match-moving territory.

Most shots in that spot didn't need a difficult perspective match - where she walks down the street with shoes-to-hair in view would have been more difficult. For comping shots like that, I'll often get a sheet of static cling plastic, and put it on a big HDMI monitor. Use a fine-point sharpie to draw in the background/set footage (do that using photoshop or whatever), and then setup the green screen shot with the same monitor and cling overlay. Having a laptop and AE on set can help double check perspective, angle, and focal length.

Shooting 60p and conforming to 24p will give you slow motion that suggests large size - but keying 720 Canon footage? Oh mercy, you'll just kill yourself. Even keying 1080 Canon footage (in my experience) is a massive pain. Try to get your hands on something like a Panasonic AC-130 which has full raster 1080 chips (but blocky AVCHD compression). The 130 with an external recorder (like the Ninja) would give you great footage - or moving up from there, something like a RED or higher level, non-AVCHD cam. If not, do some tests and see if blowing hair is going to work or should she gel it down?

Make color prints of your background plates that are graded close to your final "vision" and use them to light your talent (I send files to the local photo printer-drugstore chain and get glossy 5x7's, they beat the heck out of an inkjet unless you have a photo printer - and they're ready in an hour for a couple bucks). Watch for lighting direction and color, etc.

You could use stock stills of a downtown skyline and break them apart into fore and back building layers in Photoshop, and create a way-back (sky) layer. Stagger the layers in AE with your talent plate in-between and slightly move the AE 3d Camera - that will give you parallax which looks cool as hell. You can really move the camera around on some setups and the sense of depth added can be striking. Wash out farther-away layers a bit to simulate distance, etc.