A STEP BY STEP "HOW I DID THIS" AND A LOW-RES CLIP FROM "THE GREY PEOPLE"!!!!
WOW. I am thrilled to show you a very nice clip, that lasts for seconds in the film, but took me hours to make (mainly because I get distracted with my girlfriend and TV).
So what I'm showing you is a scene which shows our actors in an office, with the camera outside the building looking into the window - with of course some of the rest of the city in the background.
To accomplish this task, I will need one of the bluescreens provided by Tarison. I used the largest in this case, but the small should be fine.
I will select the animation of "Boss Report" and build my set around my actors. I then go into freecam mode. I will leave the camera at the position it is except to pull it back to where my characters are in a wide-shot and the "window" area is clearly off to the left of the camera more then the center.
Then I use a greenscreen prop (this is not nessessary, but it helps me later) and I place them accordingly to match where I want to "crop" the footage later. When I finished, I ended up with a image like this:
Then of course, we need our building that our characters are supposed to be in. So I go to a miniature set, I used the Future City added to 8eyedbaby.com by "Temple of the Gods", and I choose the animation of "static". I choose (I believe) camera position "3" and then aligned its focus to be parallel with the ground (the trick is to have the camera looking at the building at a small angle). I chose my building, which was the tallest of the rest, and took the camera straight up. I got the camera in the position I felt was closest to the previous scenes camera angle. When it was finished, I got a background scene that looked like this:
Now that I had both the office scene and the background plate, I exported the footage in HD and brought it into my preferred editing platform (Sony Vegas 8 Pro). To make this work, I have to do some cropping. First, the problem with the shot video is that the flooring is showing, so its not something as simple as just keying out the green. So, to get rid of the flooring and everything around the window, I will make a HD screenshot of the scene. I then open that up in my paint program and colored the window section red and everything around it green. It looked like below:
If your asking why do this, well, because again, I need to cut out everything in the office scene except the actual window. I brought the HD image into the editing timeline and keyed out the red and only the red. I placed it ontop of the office scene and got this in my preview screen:
Now to give this more realism, I needed to add another timeline between the green/redscreen image and the office scene and place a "window" texture over the actors. To accomplish this, I simply dragged a solid color media file and gave it like 10% opacity with a feathered cookie cutter in the center to create the illusion of reflection. When finished, I got this in my preview screen:
Now, this is where I utilize my patience skills...because I need to stretch those images to the width of the scene (the scene that I want to appear in the 'window'). Then I rendered the scene in HD which takes like a hour for a 30 second clip lol. I must do this because, when its finished, I want to key out the green which will cut out everything except the windowed office scene.
So while that footage is rendering, I open up another project timeline and I take the background footage of the building and there is something very important that I must do to it. I must cut-out where I want the window to fit in. Now, some might argue that if the rendering footage is just going to have all the green cut out that you can just place it ontop of the building and say your done. However, it would look like just that. I want it to look like we are looking through a window.
So I take a HD screenshot of the background since the footage is static anyways and open the image in my paint program. I then re-draw the window in red where I want the window to appear on the building. When I get finished, it looks like this:
Now that my scene from before is done rendering, I place it onto the timeline. I then take my background image with the red window cut out and I key out the red. That gives me a image that looks like this:
But I'm still not satisfied, so I will take the background footage that doesn't have the red-screen footage and place it ontop of the two others and I will lower the opacity on it maybe 25 to 30% to make it mix better with the scene. When finished, I came up with a image that looked like this:
To see the low-res finished product, click
here!
*THIS CLIP DOESN'T HAVE AUDIO, IS IN LOW-DEFINITION, AND HAS NOT BEEN COLOR CORRECTED. Some directors may find this way too much work to do for some simple 30 second scene, and while I agree with them that you have to have alot of patience to do it, I will also say that it would be the difference between you and I.
Quality vs. Speed.
Quality is my friend.