im.thatoneguy
Well-known member
This is a sci-fi faux trailer for "Prelude to War" a movie that I would love to make, but could probably never afford to do.
("right click -> save as" or equivalent appreciated)
http://www.kraftarts.com/cgtalk/Prelude_to_War_web.mov
A friend and I did this between Thursday and Saturday afternoon. From concept to filming to compositing. The 3D Zeppelin was a model I had already made last year so that saved about 40 hours of work.
Our workflow started with a concept I did in Photoshop. I then animated a pre-viz scene in 3D studio max.
We shot the actor (literally someone we just saw on the street and said "Hey you, you want to be a in a movie?") with a DVX 100A on a blue screen. (2) 800 watt soft boxes were used for modeling the actor and regular ceiling fluoros were used for fill. The bluescreen was lit using 3 banks of 4 blue kino tubes.
I started keying the footage while Sean Kraft worked out the final animation based on the pre-viz. That would be our general workflow from then on out. I would composite and he would just keep feeding me fresh renders, which I would replace with the stills I rendered out for myself.
I found with this specific project a custom difference matte as my primary keyer was more effective than Fusion's Ultrakeyer or Combustion's Diamond Keyer.
All work was done in Combustion, 3D Studio Max and Photoshop.
3D Studio was a champ and never stopped plugging away. Combustion on the other hand wasn't really up to the task. I did most of my compositing in its schematic 'node' view, but by the end, the program began to express glitches and at one point refused to render anything except for black frames, even at the footage level. I love combustion to death, but it's just so painfully slow I don't recommend it for fx work like this.
By the end we estimate we "Re-Did" this project about 3 times because of crashes, corruptions and other technical failures. "Inside" was recomposited in about an hour using all new elements after a particularly disasterous failure.
Final resolution was 720p. We shot the DVX100 Bluescreen footage "vistavision" style (i.e. on its side so that we could use the full horizontal 720 resolution as our vertical res). DV is not suited for compositing, at least an HVX rental is really in order for any FX shot in my mind and if I hadn't just grabbed was convenient would never choose to shoot with the DVX.
Unfortunately due to the super quick turn around this didn't get to anywhere near the quality I would like, however hopefully early next year I'll have some time again to make a "version 2.0" which I'll bring up to my personal standards. In the mean time feel free to pick it apart, even though it's kind of hard on a low res copy. I probably know about 90% of the glitches and problems, but I'm always looking for that next glitch. I won't list any, just so that I don't pre-load any opinions.