How Does Hollywood Do It?

A

andybiz_2005

Well-known member
Hi,

I'm sure you've seen hollywood movies where the film camera zooms in extremely close-up on a subject's face. Then zooms out wider to show the subject is in an ice-cream store, then zooms out again (bird's-eye view) to show New York's busy streets (with the ice-cream store now a speck) with yellow taxis racing by, then shows bird's-eye view of New York city, then the whole country of US, then it zooms out to show the whole of Planet Earth with space in the background & finally zooms past to show the satellite (foreground) spying on Earth (background).

How does Hollywood film these stunning images? Do they get some sort of special permit from the U.S. Department Of Defence to capture some of these satellite images from space of Earth with varying magnification? Or is it someting else?

Can we, budget movie-makers replicate something like this too?

Thanks. Hope to hear from you all.

Andrew
 
But they still need some aerail photographs of New York city & Earth right?

Do you know how I can go about doing this kind of special effects? Is After Effects capable of doing this?
 
My guess, or rather how I would go about doing the location switch where you zoom in on a face and pull out in another location would be...Do the zoom in on the face, take a dry erase marker and outline the face on the production monitor. go to setup 2 and reframe the second shot within the bounds of the first one, you can playback the first shot as well to check the lighting and angle just get it as close as you can. Then in post use a morphing SW to quickly interpolate the data between the two frames, and hide the hand off from one shot to the next. Either that or doll the whole shot Greenscreen and just trade off the backgrounds.
 
its a lot of slight of hand also. It may look like they are in an icream shop and all that but its really all 3D. Sometimes the transition between live action like inside an ice cream shop and CGI like a super wide of the city street are so smooth you cant tell when it happened. Now a days everything looks so real you can never tell when it happens except for the impossibilty of the shot.
 
There's actually an AE tutorial on creative cow for something very close to what you're talking about. Search there.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top