CPSC 815
With Dr. Davis, Fall 04
Project 2: compositing image sequences
First off, here is the movie (quicktime format).
SHOT 1: The intro
This assignment was to use shake to composite video into less-than-likely-to-be-real footage approprite for a television edition of the Weekly World News. My Concept was to explore the usefulness of giant mutated cockroaches in extreme sports, in a passtime I call roachboarding. The first task was to do the intro screen, which features a grungy floor with a few normal- size roaches surrying about. In the foreground we see text introducing the topic of the film as well as the WWN logo. the roaches were cg, with alpha channels, as seen here. I imported the background image sequnce into a film gate in maya and animated the roaches over it. The task of making the roaches go behind the fence was accopmplished by making an alpha channel matte in photoshop for the fence, as seen here. Since the background footage did not pan at all, this could be accomplished by a single still image. the text in the foreground was revealed by a rotoshaped matte. The reason I chose to treat the text in this way was to emulate the look of te old B-movie trailers form the 50's and 60's. I used a drop shadow node in shake to give the roaches a little bit of a shadow beneath them. Here is the shake node tree for this shot.
Problems Encountered:
Importing movies into maya was a PAIN. It would not import the sequence in a quicktime format. ON A MAC. It would do it on a PC, but nooo, not on a mac, even if it is QUICKTIMES NATIVE OPERATING SYSTEM. That would make too much sense. sigh....So– I exported the image sequence as a stack of iffs and it worked.
SHOT 2: R-O-U-S's: Roaches of unusual size
This shot sees the roaches growing at a frightening rate due to the consumption of some radioactive waste that has leaked from an unnamed Clemson science lab.Once again, the text in the foreground was revealed by a rotoshaped matte, and I used a drop shadow node in shake to give the animated roaches a little bit of a shadow beneath them. elsewise, the other element I had to contend with was the pool of goo that gave the roaches their freakesh size. I rendered it out in maya and gave it a glow. Using an inside node combined with a 2D transform node I copied and flipped the roaches upside down and used them to make reflections in the goo. I did the same with the background image. in addition, I put a displace node on the goo to make it refract the background. All these things put a pretty nice realism to the goo, but I wish I could have found a way to distort the goo beneath the roaches feet as they grew.Here is the shake node tree for this shot.
Problems Encountered:
Actually, this was the last shot I rendered and I assembled the clips in imovie. for some reason, when I imported the clips, imovie said it couldn't import the file (-47) . but when I restarted the program, there they were. go fig.
SHOT 3&4: Terror and Pandemonium
These shots were to represent the possible reactions people might have to the above events. I used the same type of text treatments (3 and 4) as the previous shots using rotoshapes to reveal the text. I also put monochrome nodes on the background video (3 and 4) to give it that classic Hitchcock look.Here is the shake node tree for the 3rd shot.Here is the shake node tree for the 4rth shot.
Problems Encountered:
none here.
SHOT 5: More fun
This shot was the punchline. The main idea being that if I saw a 3 foot long cockroach, I'd want to ride it. Yet again, the type treatment was a wipe-reveal using a rotoshape. The roach was matched by keyframe to the video of me riding a skateboard. Due to reason metioned hereafter, I was forced to rotoshape my skateboard out of the film nearly frame by frame. As in the second and first shots I used a dropshadow node to make, you guessed it, a dropshadow. Here is the shake node tree for this shot.
Problems Encountered:
this was not a good example of when to use rotoshaping. I had to roto nearly every darn frame, and it still looked a little wierd. This was partially due to the fact that my original idea, to put a "green skirt " over the skateboard to matte it out basically failed. The colors in the scene were really washed out which rendered them nearly impossible to color key, so...so much for that. It really would have also been a good opportunity to use tracking, as I "slid" all over the back of the roach. it was nearly impossible to match the roaches movement to mine. Also, for some reason the scene without me in it was moving all over the place, despite the tripod. It was also signifigantly brighter, despite the fact that I shot it only seconds later.
Well that's it for now ! See you next project!