FEATURE: How would you pull of this scene?

[pulp]

The title sequence for my film was a walk through a graveyard. Originally, the post production artist we were working with went out with me and supervised the shooting so that he knew he'd be able to do the proper effects. The idea was essentially to add the actor's names to the headstones we shot. After a while, it became very apparent that he wasn't going to do the work, or wasn't capable, and everyone else I've worked with since has said it'd be too much work.

So, I'm looking to reshoot it. Basically, the film starts in a graveyard, and the next scene after the titles is in a house down the street. So we basically just want to show that approach from one to the next, and work in the actor's names and other credit.s

I considered doing miniatures, but my hands are rather shaky so working with very small details like this would be somewhat daunting for me.

I've also considered just going back out and reshooting the headstones on a slider rig, so it's smoother, and marking the headstones for tracking, but that'd still mean involving another post production artist.

How would you go about handling this scene? I'd love some thoughts and advice. Thanks!

 

[Cassius]

You could actually make headstones and build a graveyard set, reshoot with tracking (which still might be difficult or impossible depending on budget), create CGI headstones or - my personal favorite - just blur out the real names and put the credits in a standard overlay during the sequence.

From a post production perspective, adding names with tracking is really easy. Making that tracking include 3D data and applying it to the text becomes trickier. Making the text look like its etched into existing real life material is too much to go into.

 

[pulp]

Thanks for the input. Really, it wouldn't need to look real as long as it were stylized, but I can imagine the line between visually appealing and looking like crap in that respect is pretty slim.