Fight Club Frame Shaking

B

bergman

Member
i am shooting a sci-fi movie and we are going to need the same effect of that famous tyler durden speaking in to the camera and the frames shaking and distorting. i presume it is done in post but how? any ideas
 
Hey

You can certainly do that in After Effects by setting key frames and moving the footage around, this would take quite a bit of work...but once you have a couple of seconds doneyou can then copy and paste the keyframes further along your footage.

You would probably need to crop in on the footage so you don't show the background (black). If I remember correctly the footage in Fight Club showed the film perforations...so you could do something like that?
 
With a locked off camera, shoot a background plate without the talent (no Tyler), preferably all background elements are static for this explanation. That is your clean background plate.

Then shoot a second pass with the talent doing his/her thing (Tyler). (Digital Fusion/Shake/AE?) Composite the two layers and apply a 'difference' key (and probably some clean up mask work required), so that the key results in just the talent (Tyler) as a separate layer on top. Then apply two camera shake nodes/algorithms (different timing/offset for each) to the background and talent top layer, so that the plates shake out of sync, as it does in the FC scene. Something like that might be a start.

If you want to go all in camera, get an electric drill, with a circular disk attached off centre. When you run the drill at various oscillating speeds and rub the disk against the tripod leg, the disk will cause the tripod to vibrate. Note, not good for tripod and likely not good for the camera, all those vibrations. That said, it has been done before by movie makers. Not advise or recommending you do this.
 
Christopher Barry said:
Note, not good for tripod and likely not good for the camera, all those vibrations. That said, it has been done before by movie makers. Not advise or recommending you do this.
Click to expand...

Hey! If its a rental, don't be gentle!


...Actually, I hate when people are like that. But I have had an old grip guy tell me that before.
 
I can't remember which Feature film's BTS I was watching, however, the film makers had some pretty heavy equipment thrashing into the tripod legs of a high end 35mm camera setup. Clearly they were adopting the 'rental, don't be gentle' school of thought. I wish I could remember the movie name now...
 
There is a short cut in after effects called the "wriggler." its basically a random number generator that you can attach to any variable like the x and y positions of a particular layer.
 
Motion 2 can imitate the shake effect, I believe the effect is called earthquake. You'll have to play with the different values though.
 
Actually, the short take where the camera appears to be shaking in Fight Club is actually the camera shaking. Conrad Hall achieved this by not even going handheld... The same shot was taken twice and blended in post. The actual manual shaking was very mild and was done while still on a tripod. The violent look comes from the rapid switching of both shots. The mild fisheye effect comes from the tripod being squared off on Brad Pitt's profile. If you pay close attention, he's hardly moving at all.
 
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