How do I shoot this?

Benny1414

Benny1414

Member
I am shooting a music video next week and I want to incorporate the effect where one person in the shot is sitting in real time and the others are moving very fast. The most recent example of this I saw is the drug trip in Garden State. I want to have someone singing along with the song, while people zoom by him in obvious sped up motion. Would the best way be some sort of mask or chroma work in post? I am going to experiment with different things this weekend, but if anyone has done this effect before or could give some advice, it would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Ben
 
Ben, the way it worked in Garden state was Zach braff sitting there for 20min as still as he could.

They shot that scene at like 1 Frame per second I think. So this would be a bit trickier with a DV camera since you can only shoot 1 frame rate basically..

what you could do, is use some clever blocking, and shoot two passes of the scene. One shot with your character sitting still, and maybe anohter shot of the other character doing the actions, maybe with a slow shutter speed of 1/8th or something to give the blurry effect.

You could also do it green screen if you have it.. but it is a tricky thing to do..
 
I've tried what Zach Braff did and I can tell you it's pretty tough not to move and still make it look good...
But then again, I always have to be moving.. try to get someone who is good a sitting still :)

but ya, if you do it right, you can get pretty decent results..
 
my guess would be a lock down shot.

Put green screen behind the actor/performer and shoot the performance.

Pull the screen and actor and chair and film your extras passing by, then speed that footage up and composite the two.

-j
 
That's it, the tree alternatives were put. You'll have to decide what to do:

If the fast moving actors don't pass behind or in front of the still actor, you can make two passes with the camera locked down and do a split screen.

If they are, you'll have t composite the two shots with a greenscreen.

Or you could just do as they did in the old times, and get your talent to stand still. (you can always skip the frames he moves too much, or do some fine adjustment later...)
 
I have a sequence like this on my reel:

http://www.demoreelnetwork.com/chupap/index.shtml

It appears around 1:27--only a couple of representative shots on the reel, but in the film it lasts a few minutes.

We shot the actors with green screen for each angle, then pulled the screen and shot the background plates at 2 fps. We added a blur effect in post as well.

The order of business for this sort of composite is a bit lengthy: we lit each angle for both foreground and background; added the green screen and lit it; shot the foreground action; pulled the green screen and associated lighting and shot the background plates. Obviously once you start shooting you have to make sure the camera is fully locked down, sandbags on the sticks etc.
 
Thanks to everyone for their input! I'm still not sure which method will work best for my application, but I have a lot to go with now. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Ben
 
You know what could be interesting? You could figure out exactly how fast you want to speed the walking people up by, then you could slow down the song by the opposite of that amount, and film it all live, having the band member lip-sync to a super slowed down version of the song. Obviously that way when the footage is sped up, his lips will sync to the original timing. You also wouldn't have to keep the camera locked down. Could be a bizarre look.
 
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