Invisible Man FX - How?

J.R. Hudson

J.R. Hudson

Spirit Animal
I'm going to play tennis for a few hours; but wanted to start this so I could junkie when I got home tonight:

I'm trying to wrap my head around how to pull off classic Invisible Man techniques....

MAN UNWRAPS BANDAGES AND IS INVISIBLE

Each and all techniques
 
Wat you mean?

Like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen ? that dude?

CGI to the max....or....paint the persons skin like a really neony blue or green and key him/her out and get a background plate of the area the person is standing in so you can still see the background through the bandages when keyed out.

those are the only two that i would know how to do it..
 
That's what I am thinking Hawkman

Without Motion Control I have to have:

A shot of area 'locked down plate'
A shot with actors in same 'locked down shot' including an actor with 'Key material'

Then in post combine them? IS this my only realistic option?
 
I think there are full-body blue/green-screen suits, you could make, or buy, something like this and dress the person in it. Then dress their regular clothes over it. Then do as DBox says and key them out.

Just a thought.
 
I'd shoot the actor in front of a green screen (also wearing the same green, the tighter the better) and combine that footage with your background footage.

I saw a behind the scenes thing a few years back for Memoirs of an Invisible Man. They had Chevy Chase in a spandex chroma blue outfit. Not pretty.
 
Yea but..if its against a green screen....and they need to interact with something..like a glass...or walk around objects..its going to be a *****.

actually..interacting with anything would be hard...like pickup a glass..half the bottom of the glass would be missing cuz of the key out..and you cant make a background plate of a statoinary glass....if you do...get some reallly good keyer...then super duper good motion tracking.

John..if you can do/know someone that does CGI..it should be a breeze then.
 
Larry R said:
I think there are full-body blue/green-screen suits, you could make, or buy, something like this and dress the person in it. Then dress their regular clothes over it. Then do as DBox says and key them out.

Just a thought.
Click to expand...

Those full body suits are not cheap though Larry....and i heard like impossible to get into.....If you could find a place where they sell them....send the link.

but i would go with the paint....its most fastest thing....make sure its like washable paint..that will wear off in like a day. Id hate to walk around school or suttin being blue or green...:)
 
so much of this depends on the shot....if its a close up, you wll have a problem once they start to unwrap because you should start to see the other side of the bandages...which you wont be able to...so you will have to paint it in, which will require lots of motion tracking. some wide shots you can get away a bit more with not having to deal with the otherside.

to make it easy on you, lock the shot off...shoot a clean plate of the bg....then shoot your actor unwraping with blue fabric below, then in post key the blue, and overlay ontop of the clean bg plate.

if they interact with something...a low budge way of doing it would be to use fishing wire and small suction cups to pick things up and puppet them around. or tape a rod/stick of some kind to the object and move it around, and shoot it locked off with clean plates and you can easly roto out the stick/rod.
 
It depends how far you wanna for the invisible guy but more importantly the clothes he wears.

If it is just looking through the bandages and see the background then shoot first the background without the actor and you'll get one layer for that.
Than as someone else said shoot the actor with some blue or green on his face and the bandages on. You must seen the blue/green pieces of his face through the bandages to be able to key it out. Shoot that with the camera in the same position and put that on another layer. You will then keyout the guy's face and see through the bandages. If the camera doesn't move that will be ok.

Now still with no camera movement the problem will arise if you want to see the back of the bandages that are behind the actor's head. That is if you want to see basically inside his face that is invisible. In this case you will need to find a way to shoot the bandages most like in 3d via a tool like 3ds Max or equivalent, or if you're good you can paint it, and add it to your shot in one more layer.
If you watch the making of Sleepy Hollow, they explain in detail how they shot the crazy Christopher Walken when his head is gone. They did "just" that. They shot the background, then the actor with the green cap on, but they then had to shoot the inside of the his coat around the neck that is hidden by the green cap on the actor's head. They generated a 3d model of that part of his clothing and added it back. Since the actor is moving around like crazy they had to perfectly compute the 3d piece movements so that it matches perfectly the actor's movement. Addintg to that camera movements and rotoscoping the whole thing gave a perfect result.
I'm pretty sure you want to avoid that so you have to only create shots were you see through the actor but where you do not see the backround of his clothes, just the background of the set.
 
that green suit was probably just for the animators to track him and his movements or suttin..cuz most parts...you see like faint images of his body..but its mostly CGI

CGI is the best way to go for this.
 
I'm not sure how it would integrate with actually taking clothing off the character but displacement mapping is always a fun trick when you want "invisibility."

About removing the actors head...

If you have a background shot and the scene shot you don't need to key anything really. Just paint out the actors head as you see fit.
 
You'd probably want to experiment with displacement maps on the background as well... they did something similar in Hollow Man I believe.... so you can tell he's there, but not REALLY there. Just the background blurs and distorts in reference to where his body is, but still clear.
 
see if you can find the Levi's commercial called "invisible" dir by michael bay, its really great...

and there is a garbage video called cherry lips that has the same sort of shite...
 
kai said:
You'd probably want to experiment with displacement maps on the background as well... they did something similar in Hollow Man I believe.... so you can tell he's there, but not REALLY there. Just the background blurs and distorts in reference to where his body is, but still clear.
Click to expand...

Wouldnt it be the same way they did Predator?? Like you see him..but its distorted?..i figured for Hollow Man..its all CGI displacement..like an ice effect applied to the character or suttin.
 
there was an article in photoshop user about the Levi ad. The point I remember was with clothes. For example if you have an invisible man wearing a collared shirt, you should be able to see the back (inside) of the collar, which you wont be able to do with a person in the shirt, you'd have to roto it in...
 
blckhawk542 said:
Wouldnt it be the same way they did Predator?? Like you see him..but its distorted?..i figured for Hollow Man..its all CGI displacement..like an ice effect applied to the character or suttin.
Click to expand...

I believe in Hollowman they shot Bacon wearing/painted green in front of a blue screen for some shots. For example, when he's wet. There was no displacement usually, unlike Predator, only when some particles/gases and stuff were invloved. They still had to do lots of CGI for every scene with him, simply because he is not transparent and whatever is at the side of him we don't see (we don't see normally and we do when he's invisible) had to be painted...
Anyway, get the DVD, John, there is lots of cool BTS there. Movie is crap, but the vfx are quite amazing.
 
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