lxjordanxl
Active member
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD0_5HFMPIg&feature=youtube_gdata_player&fb_source=message
How in the world was this done?
How in the world was this done?
Can someone explain this shot to me?
- Thread starter lxjordanxl
- Start date
sonofaresiii
Well-known member
looks like a greenscreen composite
refocusedmedia
Veteran
The director can:
To understand the shot, take it to the point where the girl is reaching up for the knob on the cupboard's mirror. The girl to your right is the main plate, and is a relatively short sequence. The cupboard with the (fake) mirror is really a cupboard door with greenscreen paint and markers. The girl composited in the mirror is a second shot beginning from the bottom of the stairs to the point where she reaches up, across the lens axis, to grab at non-existent knob. The real knob and the "real" girl's hands will hide any discrepancies. On a frame by frame analysis, you can see the fingers don't really match as she makes her reach (not that it matters). Since no two performances will be exact, the second shot (a mirrored composite over the greenscreen) can be retimed to ensure the two hand motions match more closely, and the fingers could be cut out and morphed to get a closer match if the director felt it was important.
To make it more believable, 3D geometry of a mirror with reflective and refractive characteristics can also be composited into the shot - assuming they did a 3D track for the main plate, or they may have used simple distortion/bevel effects to the edge of the "mirror" to give the illusion of bevelled glass.
If you were looking at the setup for the final comp, you would see a matte for the mirror, with the running stairs shot playing inside the matte. The whole shot would begin with the compositing camera showing only what's in the mirror, and pulling back as the "real" girl starts her motion of reaching across the mirror.
The slow-mo effect of her running down the hall was actually motivated by the need to make this final composite more manageable and also more appreciated. If the director had kept her running in real time, the action of grabbing a knob and opening a cupboard door would have happened so fast that no-one would have cared. So the knew they had to slow down that shot to get the desired impact (and, frankly, control.) So they slow her down from the top of the stairs, as if implying that they want to add gravity to her situation, when their intentions are really being driven by other more practical needs.
This is why movie-making's closest cousin is the magician's performance - so much done on screen is about misdirection to overcome practical obstacles while displaying the remarkable.
I doubt they would have used a real mirror or glass on the cupboard because they want to sell the composite as a reflection, so any real reflections would probably get in the way. If it had been a TV, however, with footage playing in it that had nothing to do with what is in the foreground, they very often would leave the TV off, so the reflections on the glass of the TV can be composited over the fake footage, making the fake footage be that much more convincing.
Cool shot.
To make it more believable, 3D geometry of a mirror with reflective and refractive characteristics can also be composited into the shot - assuming they did a 3D track for the main plate, or they may have used simple distortion/bevel effects to the edge of the "mirror" to give the illusion of bevelled glass.
If you were looking at the setup for the final comp, you would see a matte for the mirror, with the running stairs shot playing inside the matte. The whole shot would begin with the compositing camera showing only what's in the mirror, and pulling back as the "real" girl starts her motion of reaching across the mirror.
The slow-mo effect of her running down the hall was actually motivated by the need to make this final composite more manageable and also more appreciated. If the director had kept her running in real time, the action of grabbing a knob and opening a cupboard door would have happened so fast that no-one would have cared. So the knew they had to slow down that shot to get the desired impact (and, frankly, control.) So they slow her down from the top of the stairs, as if implying that they want to add gravity to her situation, when their intentions are really being driven by other more practical needs.
This is why movie-making's closest cousin is the magician's performance - so much done on screen is about misdirection to overcome practical obstacles while displaying the remarkable.
I doubt they would have used a real mirror or glass on the cupboard because they want to sell the composite as a reflection, so any real reflections would probably get in the way. If it had been a TV, however, with footage playing in it that had nothing to do with what is in the foreground, they very often would leave the TV off, so the reflections on the glass of the TV can be composited over the fake footage, making the fake footage be that much more convincing.
Cool shot.