Help for an ambitious camera spin

[drummerboy678]

I'm shooting a music video for a band, and about 3/4ths of the way through it, we want to try an effect. I havn't promised anything, and I thought I'd come on here and ask some advice, then shoot some tests before we even start filming.
The desired effect, is two people playing chess, one gets mad, and hits the chess board... The pieces fly up and fade to slow motion as they hang in the air. I'd like for the camera to sort of spin around, or float through the pieces, rotate 180 degrees, to show the band on the other side... Then they fall, and the band plays.

Now, it sounds ambitious, but I was thinking about filming the scene with the characters just hitting an empty chess board, and using some 3d chess pieces that I already modeled in 3d Studio Max. I was going to composite all this in AE (I know 3d Studio relatively well, but only the basics of AE), so I wasn't sure the best way to do this. What should I actually film?

If anyone has any experience or ideas for this, I'd love some advice. I'll have time to do 3-4 tests before we shoot anything for the video, so I'm not worried.. I'd just love to create a cool effect for the video.

Thanks in advance,
-Taylor

 

[Steve_Arm]

You are on the right track, shoot the people with the board empty and the 3D the rest of the scene. For better results you can place some points for camera tracking in 3DsMAX.Also for more better results greenscreen them.Then in AE or wherever you like match the look of the 2 composite elements, 3 with the background.

 

[surf]

Steve_Arm says right.

 

[graymachine]

An alternate way would be to use a particle generator in AE. You can orient the particles to the camera using Particular and a little trick I came up with.

The tutorial is on my tutorial page:

http://www.graymachine.com/tutorials.html

Look for the "Particular 3D Orientation" tut.

Cheers.

Harry

http://www.graymachine.com

 

[oneinfiniteloop]

Here are some tips, coming from someone who just shot a music video with some effects shots. Unfortunately, on-set I forgot some of these so it makes post that much harder.

1. Plan your shot carefully!!! Board it out and think of every possible caveat you could run into. Very careful planning will go a lot farther than extensive testing and guesswork.

2. Shoot mulitple plates. Unfortunately, you probably don't have access to a motion control system, so you can't shoot matched plates, but you can shoot a plate with them hitting the actual chessboard with pieces, without pieces, with actors, without actors. A clean plate is very important because if you have to paint something out it's much easier to have a clean plate rather than cloning, etc.

3. Try to keep any objects from obscuring the path of the chess pieces. This will help keep the roto work in post to a minimum, which is the real time killer. I just spent almost a full day roto'ing out a person for 47 frames using 14 rotoshapes (masks) because I didn't plan through enough.

4. On-set reference is key! Get as much on-set data as possible, camera setting, f/stop, angle of view, focal length, distance, focus distance, etc. If you can build a rudimentary rotation platform with markers on it to keep the camera moves somewhat uniform, and by using this and a tape measure you can get a rough idea of the dimensions of the camera move. This will help greatly if you don't have 3D tracking software.

5. Get some HDRi's of the set/lighting. Go get out your dSLR and set it up on a tripod in the final camera position and take a set of bracketed exposures in RAW mode. Go about 5 under and 5 over. Take these into CS2, HDR Shop, or Photosphere and combine to make a HDR image. You can then use this in your renderer for IBL rendering to get the most realistic reflections/lighting on your chess pieces.

6. Compositing/Rendering: Do it in passes! Some people don't like multipass rendering/compositing since it's a considerable amount of work to set up, but it gives you so much flexibility. I prefer to set up a RGB light pass alongisde your other shadow, diff, ambient passes so that you can control your lighting in the composition stage, versus having to re-render from your 3d app for small changes. In AE, I'm not sure how to set up this rig since I do it in Shake, but here is the link to the tutorial I used to perfect my method: http://www.tahlniran.com/. Click on the tutorial link at the top and then select the Shake tut's and number 3 is the one with the 3 point lighting set up. You'll have to translate the shake nodes into AE to figure it out, but it shouldn't be too hard.

And, plan it out, this is not an easy shot that you talk about, but doable with lots of planning.