How to make a person out of crows...

D

drfaustmd

New member
Hello, I've been browsing this community for quite sometime, but never really posted before. But I have a question that I was hoping someone could help me out with.

I'm not quite sure how to word this, but basically, I'm making a music video for a local group, and I want to have a shot of of the singer suddenly turning into a flock of crows that flys away (they did something like that in the film "The Prophecy" I believe) anyone know how I could accomplish that? I have plenty of green screen footage of the singer and a lot of crows flying through the sky. They were shot, thankfully enough, on a pretty clear day and i was able to key the sky out so I have just the crows that I can work with. Hope you guys know what I am talking about haha i'm really bad at explaining things sometimes.... Thanks for any help you can offer me! :)

EDIT: Here is a trailer for the Prophecy, towards the end you can see the effect I am talking about, it doesn't seem overly complicated, but I can't seem to figure it out on my own, thanks again! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114194/trailers-screenplay-E19326-10-2
 
for that shot, if you frame by frame it, there isn't really any transition from him to the birds. he is there, and then shatters (almost looks like the AE shatter effect as old as that plugin is) but as he shatters, one piece flys through the camera, obscuring the majroity of the frame. the next frame is the start of the birds flying outwards. This was would be simple, and you could even film it yourself (well, if you had acces to birds, lighting, and a backdrop) and then by filming a clean plate, composite them in. If you were able to shoot white doves against a dark screen, or black birds against a white screen you could simply use a blending mode to put them in.

If you dont have access to filming birds, the next best route would be to do it with a 3d app. Basically, you would animate flapping on a model of a bird and save that motion as file. You then create a particle emitter and instead of emitting partcles, you swap the particles for models. Then you apply the motion file back, and each model is animated and behaves as a particle system. You dont need a high quality model either, since it's pretty much sillouetted, a fairly low poly, low detail model would work. You can even buy them online.

Otherwise, you will have to try and find keyable videos of birds or a bird and put each in one or a few at a time.
 
hello, thanks for your quick response. Well I don't have acess to a 3D program (or basic knowledge on how to use for that matter....) I do however have the birds already keyed out in they're own files (only 1 bird at a time though) I've been playing around with the shatter effect, is it possible to replace the shape of the shatter with the file of the keyed out bird? I tried to do a "custom shatter map" within the shatter effect to the keyed out bird, didn't work though (or I did something wrong....) if worse comes to worse I guess I could always just use a shatter effect with a preset and then quickly drop in some birds flying away from the center of the body, it may look kind of cheesy but if i'm careful enough it may work, hopefully it won't come to that because it sounds rather time consuming haha thanks for your help so far!
 
You might be able to use a combination of Particular (using your pre-keyed birds as custom particles) and animated mattes of your person...look at Trapcode's site to see if they have anything that might help:

http://www.trapcode.com
 
drfaustmd said:
hello, thanks for your quick response. Well I don't have acess to a 3D program (or basic knowledge on how to use for that matter....) I do however have the birds already keyed out in they're own files (only 1 bird at a time though) I've been playing around with the shatter effect, is it possible to replace the shape of the shatter with the file of the keyed out bird? I tried to do a "custom shatter map" within the shatter effect to the keyed out bird, didn't work though (or I did something wrong....) if worse comes to worse I guess I could always just use a shatter effect with a preset and then quickly drop in some birds flying away from the center of the body, it may look kind of cheesy but if i'm careful enough it may work, hopefully it won't come to that because it sounds rather time consuming haha thanks for your help so far!
Click to expand...


You could take the last frame of the sequence, export it as a .psd, open it in Photoshop, remove the blackground, cut the image into sections and put each on it's own layer, and then animate each layer independently in After Effects. You coul have great control over the look of it, as well as being able to determine which chunks to fly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top