Arms coming out of the floor

S

skywalks

Active member
Hello. I'm doing a bit of pre production research. If I were to film a shot of a character running down a cement hallway and I wanted to digitally add arms coming at the main character what would be the best way to go about doing this?
 
OK here's a shot. First you shoot the hallway with the actor. Then using something like VeeScope Live you shoot the arms in a green-screen stage. Your using VeeScope so you can see the live mat and that will let you get the lighting correct on the arms so they look like they are in the hallway. Later your going to composite the arms and the original shot and you will have to add shadows, which might be a pain but very important. You only really need the arms all the way up since your going to have them com from behind a mat anyway. Now if you want it really cool you use either tracking marks on the wall or Mocha to track the camera movements and you can do it with non locked down set ups.
 
And add a few CU if the arms coming through the cement shot separately. You would have to decide HOW the arms actually move through the concrete and use an appropriate prop hunk of rigged "floor".
 
Are the arms bursting through the floor (or wall), or are they already protruding from the floor? Bursting through the floor will almost certainly require some sort of practical fakery, would be very difficult to do convincingly digitally. If already protruding from the floor or they magically just poke through the floors/walls like ghosts, then greenscreen like Noiz2 suggests shouldn't be too difficult, so long as all they need to do is wave around. Once you have a few establishing shots, you can probably do closeups where the floor/wall isn't visible, which will save a lot of work.

I'm assuming this is zero budget? If however you actually have a budget, then maybe build a fake hallway with holes in the walls for extras to poke their hands through?

Be careful too about how many arms you need - a forest of hundreds of arms might look very cool, but would also be the hardest either practically or digitally
 
The arms are there already and are provoked by the person walking through the hall.
Thanks for the advice thus far guys!
 
if this were me i would use mostly lower camera angles so that the composite would be much easier without need for shadows ect. and I could easily accentuate the arms by simply being closer to them. also if you plan your shots carefully for the edit before hand you can just get a few angles with shots that you know will be compelling and sell the effect while avoiding messy comp issues of some single shot with a long duration in which everything is seen. this will also help sell the effect since any effect sitting onscreen too long is more likely to get pointed out as an effect as the audience has more time to study it.
 
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