lighting a piece of glass for animation shoot...

Lill Creates:

Lill Creates:

Member
here's the deal, i have a client (an animator) who wants white paint splatter out of nowhere. in other words, he wants a dome of black (nowhere) over a sheet of glass with the camera below it. then white paint will be poured or dropped onto the glass giving him a paint splatter he can key. i have a few ideas; however, i'd like to know how other dvxusers would do it.

so my question is, how would you light the glass?

all input welcome!!!

:dankk2:
 
I have exactly what you're talking about. Problem is I don't remember where I got it. I believe it was something I got as an "extra" in a set of stock footage I bought off ebay a long time ago. The set was called "editfx".

Anyway, you don't need to use glass and fancy lighting to do this. Its much simpler than you think.

Just record some video of paint spilling on white cardboard (cardboard at a 45 degree angle to let gravity do its work). Start at the top and left and spill paint on the cardboard across a section (left to right) that your camera is focused on. Let the paint drip down until the entire area the camera sees is nicely covered. You'll want to make sure the paint covers the area the first time--it wouldn't look right to come back and add more in another pass from left to right. It'll be tricky to get this to look "cool" and right and may take more than one time.

Then bring in the footage and experiment in your NLE with plugins which will increase or decrease contrast and do whatever is necessary to silhouette the paint and the white cardboard as much as possible. No other colors and no unexposed area once the key is finished. You may also need to speed up the footage if necessary to get it to happen faster.

For your finished result of what you see in the key, you'll want what looks like a 2D "cartoon" animated, high contrast picture of black paint spilling on white background with absolutely no glistening or glimmering anywhere on the paint. Another reason not to use fancy lighting. Use as soft a lighting as possible to keep it from having any glistening effects. Good luck!
 
I just noticed two other things you mentioned. Sounds like he wanted white on black. You can still do what I said but run a "negative" plugin to reverse the colors. Also you mentioned something about a dome. Not totally sure what you mean. Is that like a frame around a picture? If so, just come back after you've done the above work and added some kind of cookie cutter image matte on top of everything. Vegas for instance lets you do this.
 
I think he meant that the camera would be below the sheet of glass with a black silk up above for background.
 
JasonFox said:
I think he meant that the camera would be below the sheet of glass with a black silk up above for background.
Click to expand...

I still don't see why it needs to be glass or shot from below. The final effect is just a silhouette animation for keying one scene another (if I understand correctly). So as long as the final effect is achieved I doubt it matters how you do it. It just sounds like so much trouble to get a large sheet of glass, messy to pour paint on it, etc.
 
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