Tuesday

Time Lapse

POSTDATED - 14/05/12

Today I've been working on the big sexy time lapse shot. Setting up this shot required a little bit of extra equipment borrowed from the photography department, as well as having to venturing into the engineering department! Excitement!

Anyway, first off I chroma keyed my live-action guide footage in, which was the live-action footage at sunset of Ky walking over the horizon at St. Lythans. While I was fiddling around with making the low-res guide footage I also had a go at compositing this live-action footage onto the long exposure time lapse sequence. Originally I thought I was going to have to rotoscope around Ky with travelling masks, but I discovered that because the sky was so bright in this shot I could use a combination of blending modes in After Effects to take out all of the white, which did 90% of the work for me. Bonus!

Next I set up the camera in a rough configuration and took still to mark the wolf's start and end points.

 

What I found in this setup didn't give enough room to fit any lights in and I wasn't entirely sure where to put the lights because in the original footage the light source is the setting sun, which is in shot. The scaffolding we have for attaching lights wasn't up to the job of getting a light there, and using a tripod would leave the stand in shot, so I went down to the photography for some more advice. Roger loves my little visits. Probably...

From roger I got a C-stand and some other gadgets and gizmos that I don't know the name of. The first problem I ran into while using these bits of kit was that the scaffolding in my booth was clearly put together by someone with a loose understanding of spanner theory. Or maybe just really tired wrists? Anyway, I had to fix the scaffolding up tight, so I went on a mission that led me to the engineering department and borrowed a socket wrench kit from a guy who looks and sounds like Keith from The Office. It probably wasn't Keith from The Office though, his name is Jeremy. But maybe that's the actor's name? Oh Man!
Nope, Keith from The Office's real name is Ewen MacIntosh apparently. What a disappointment.
Anyway... Pa-Pow! Take that, gravity!


Next thing to do was set up the camera and table up so that I could get proper angles on the lighting, keeping the keylight further away from the puppet to match how the sun is far away (I did my best, but obviously there's only so much room I could work with).

Finally I played around with different gels to get the right colouring on the puppet, and adjusted my secondary light with some CineFoil so that it would drop some light on the green screen but not spill over on to the puppet.






And then I proceeded to animate my wolf walking sooooo slowwwwwly, which turned out to be quite challenging surprisingly enough.



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