Fight Club Apartment/catalog sequence

I'm suspicious the words have been rendered in 3D space to track their apparent position in relationship to the real walls. Although I suppose it might have all been done in 2D, very carefully tracking the apparent 3D motion. The bit where the guy walks past and casts a shadow on the FURNI lettering could be awkward, but is very brief so may have been rotoscoped.
 
If you are only needing to replicate the appearing words it isn't that difficult a shot to accomplish. This is a nodal pan so that tracking the moving background merely requires matching a spherical projection. You can do this in any of the motion tracking suites (Boujou, MatchMovePro, SynthEyes, PFtrack etc.) Tracking the camera pan will allow you to drop in the letters perfectly in 3D space.

The bigger problem would be if you did have to deal with the appearing furniture, since that would require two perfectly matched camera passes and would most likely have reuired a motion-control camera. You could pull it off with some work by shooting two passes and then conforming them, but it would be a pain in the rear to pull off perfectly.
 
I wonder if the appearing furniture is lo-tech - just stop animation shot on a camera with one of those fancy worm gear tripod attachments (sorry, don't know the technical name) so you can turn a wheel and pan exactly 1 degree or whatever. The only hard bit would be matching to the snippet of live action at the end.
 
If you watch the clip carefully you see that Norton never interacts with that scene, he simply walks through it at the end.

That tells me it is likely a 3d animation, and he was composited into it at the end.

The only affect he has on the scene at all is a slight shadow on the blue furni sign.
 
This was in Cinefx magazine. The shot it by a motion controlled camera with several passes. First without the furniture. Then added the furniture in another take w Edward Norton. Then they rotocoped the furniture in and 3d tracked the shot. Finally adding the graphics. You can easily track it with the programs mentioned above.
 
Thanks for the help guys. I'll see if anyone I know has access to one of those programs.

I'll post up the project when I'm done with it.

Thanks again

Chris
 
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