1 actor, multiple roles, same shot... Handheld.

C

CamenHodges

Active member
So, I need to shoot 1 actor in multiple roles with a camera that appears to be hand-held. Think Adaptation but with up to 4 doubles. Now, it's relatively easy to lock the camera off and get that effect, but when you introduce any kind of camera movement into the equation, things get complicated.

So. I can't afford a motion control rig (at least I don't know of one that's affordable). I want to stay away from half assed After Effects work...

What are my options for getting a hand-held documentary feel?
 
Are you talking about having the one actor appear more than once on screen at the same time? For those shots, you will need the camera in the exact same spot, one way or another. The only cheap solution I can think of is a locked camera and then add some gentle camera wobble in post-production. If you plan your shots carefully, hopefully you could mix such shots in with all the genuine handheld shots.
 
Yes, thats what I mean. Two or more versions of the same actor talking to himself. I found this video (at the bottom of my post). Anyone know how did he did this? Would the same technique be usable on a small scale set?

Also if anyone knows if there is an industry standard term for this effect it would help immensely with searching for ways to do it...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQf4IybnSZA
 
Have you thought about using Mocha Pro. I haven't used the removal for this technique but if you look at their site they have some good overviews of the removal tool. I've also got a tutorial where by they remove a guy from a moving shot. The way Mocha works is you can tell it to search frames within the scene that are free of the character. It will then try to fill in the gap using these frames. You can also feed it clean plates that you touched up in Photoshop and it will use these and blend them together.
So in theory you could rotacope all of the different plates so that you have all your characters free of a background and then clean all the backgrounds of the characters and place the rotos where you want.


To be honest all the shots I've seen this removal used on are usually on random backgrounds like snow/grass/trees so I have no idea how well it works on hard edge surfaces like buildings, but it's worth a look. You can download a trial.

By the way I think that video was probably made by rotoscoping the guy in each scene and then just have a clean plate with the camera move. Then they probably tracked the clean plate and added back the roto characters using the tracking info so they moved with enviroment. Then added shadows to make him sit better. The reason I think this is because although the camera is moving it never rotates left or right, thus maintaining the illusion that they're 3d not flat.


Pete B
 
Last edited:
CamenHodges said:
Yes, thats what I mean. Two or more versions of the same actor talking to himself. I found this video (at the bottom of my post). Anyone know how did he did this? Would the same technique be usable on a small scale set?

Also if anyone knows if there is an industry standard term for this effect it would help immensely with searching for ways to do it...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQf4IybnSZA
Click to expand...

For that particular shot he probably first shot the drummer in the scene then pulled back the camera to get the main shot.
Next he likely shot a bunch of individual shots of playing guitar against a green screen and matted them out to get a nice alpha.
Next he'd track the original shot with 3D tracking program and import the tracking data and the background shot into a 3d program. The 3d camera would follow along.
Next he'd place 2d planes (billboards) with each of the guitar player shots and space them out along the camera path. Then render the camera move.

It'd work in this case because there is no camera parralax. But other scnerios might require a completely different technique.
 
Yeah, what Gord says. in fact there's a related video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_avHzhKUQ4&annotation_id=annotation_574254&feature=iv which even shows the greenscreen. Very effectively done, but looking at their other videos, they obviously have a lot of experience with compositing etc.

It doesn't help you with your own shots though, Camen, other than being a great demonstartion of why to shoot on an overcast day, coz it simplifies lighting and shadows so much :)
 
So in theory I could shoot one side of the scene with the actor, and shoot the second side with a portable green screen behind the same actor in a different costume. Or am I missing something? As long as the background tracked it should work, right?
 
Yup, something like that. It's the background tracking that's the hard part - if you didn't need the handheld look, you might not even need greenscreen (so long as the actor never crossed the middle of the screen), you could just film both halves of the action (with the identical background) then use masking in post-production to show both versions of the actor onscreen at once.
 
I wouldn't say the tracking would be that hard if it was for a similar shot. They had lots of clear edges a points to track with nothing blocking the path. You could use After Effects tracking easily enough to track that shot. The hardest part is rotoscoping especially the hair.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top