Short saber duel featuring sky replacement and DfN

[DMPjedi]

Hello,
Over spring break my cousin and I choreographed and shot a short little lightsaber duel out of bordem. I planned on doing sky replacement all along because we had a boring white sky through the first part of shooting. Well our mid-afternoon shoot went clear into night so I decided I'd color correct the whole thing as night. Then I decided to keep with my original plan and replace the sky also.

So the other night I put together (fairly quickly) a 10000x1000 matte painting of space using images from this site (http://www.etacarinae.net/Spaceart/index.htm). I'm really learning sky replacement as I go and made quick bitter enemies with handheld shots+trees+1/30th shutter speed :P

Here are several screen shots. I shall post the film whenever it's done (about a week or two). This is kind of a test duel for a future fanfilm.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/dmpjedi/cvc3.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/dmpjedi/cvc1.jpg
I have no idea why this one is smaller. On my computer it actually has a bigger file size...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/dmpjedi/cvc2.jpg

The usual, comments, critiques welcome :)

[NickATnitE]

I like your moxy, and your mattes look clean but there are some serious mistakes going on that you should fix now since it's still early on in the process.

First I suggest getting rid of the nebulas, nebulai, Whatever they look like clouds that aren't in proper perspective. along with this I think you need to add a lot of atmosphere between you and the sky it would be rare to ever see perfect space from a planet,
Though it could be said that this is Star wars and they could be on an inhabited asteroid or something. but trees and people need oxygen and that means haze, well actually it's the nitrogen but the poin remains.

I also think you should get rid of a lot of contrast and colour information and bring it all to a more dark blue grey or dark colour of whatever your planet sky is.
If you are using after effects or combustion I suggest adding adjustment layers with animated masks so that you can selectivley take away or add colour. Lightsaber bounce light etc.

Finally I mentioned your mattes are clean but I think they are too clean you should add some edge blur, or a matte choker to make them sink in to the background.

Hope this helps you out

Nick

[DMPjedi]

Thanks for the input. I can see what you mean about seeing perfect space from a planet. (note the trees appear dead..uum..we're holding our breath :p ) I'll definately add some haze. I guess I'm trying to find a balance between creative/artistic license and suspension of disbelief. An atmosphere would help I guess.

The mattes are handpainted using vector paint in After Effects for the ground level stuff and the stripes/bright spots on my cousin's jacket. I'm adjusting the levels to matte out the trees without losing too much detail. I did take the saturation of the forground down a bit, but apparently not enough? About the sabers, I've done one other night duel but I still haven't experimented with having them cast light in a video, only images. I might as well try it on this duel.

For my future film I mentioned (I think production just got postponed until Summer 2006 rather than this year) how about a more realistic sky idea: Having a real beautiful moon that orbits closer than usual which is clearly visible just through the clouds (Like in A New Hope) which would cast more light. Possibly some rings? I wonder how that'd look from the planet surface :roll: Anywho, this little film FIRST...

Another note on the mattes, looking at the shot of my cousin jumping, activating his lightsaber: I think I may have forgot any blur on the matte at all. That does look way too sharp.

Thanks for the input again, very valuble.

[DVeditor]

Nice work DMP. The only suggestion I have would be to try blurring the edges of your mask(s) a bit more so the contrast isn't so harsh between you and the background. I like the trees - they give the images some depth and enhance the look of the matte painting IMHO. 8) Very good stuff here - keep up the good work!

[DMPjedi]

Alright, I have a video clip for ya'll. It's the sabers casting light on the ground in post. Keep in mind this is the very first time I've tried this. I'm also curious about the color correction (no sky replacement in this shot) as it's another DfN.

Right click, save as please (http://dmp.newfreehost.com/nvc_12.mov)

Right off the bat I think I need to add masks on my cousin's face. Input?

[DVeditor]

Very nice...I like the color a lot, and the only real issue I can see is the foreground person's legs - his saber glow is overlapping the opposite side of his legs when his saber is in front of him. Other than that nice work thus far!

[PostaL]

Nice work! Me and one of my friends have done this animated :lol: . If you want to take a look the file can be found here:

http://www.mnm.go.ro/download/our/star_worst.zip (paste this in your address bar :wink: )

[NickATnitE]

The interactive light is a good test. although it may be a little over saturated but it is like you said a test. You can see how much work is involved in getting all those masks working properly. Obviously the best solution is to get everything in camera when you are shooting. get some buddies to run around with glow sticks and coloured spotlights off camera just to get that lighting going on. it doesn't have to be perfect, as long as it's there your brain will accept what it is seeing.

Use every trick you can think of to pull it off and Plan Plan Plan before you start shooting. It's good that you have done a couple comps now, cause knowing how your'e gonna do it will help you tremendously to get the shots you need.

I don't know if you have seen it but there is a great featurette on the Fellowship of the Ring Extended cut DVD about Colour Grading. It is very inspirational and relates directly to this kind of stuff. they use some very subtle tricks and colour theory to lead the viewers eye, It's definetly a must watch.

Good luck with your film, I look forward to seeing it on TFN Fanfilms.

Nick

[DMPjedi]

The thing to remember about that test clip is it was day for night, so we couldn't really do any on set lighting. We never intended to do day for night, just ended up doing it because shooting ran that long. I'm thinking of using this as strictly testing and shoot a new duel soon here with all of this thought out ahead of time (like putting in some tracking markers or something). Plus this fight itself is just plain cheesy and not that fun to watch. It's mostly eye candy with the sky replacement :P

I was working on trying to get some atmosphere working and was wondering if anyone had any tips. I put in a gradient so it fades from black at the horizon into the nebula sky. It just doesn't seem like enough. I don't know, I'll get some shots up tomorrow after school. For now, I must sleep.

Thanks for the comments :D

PostaL, what'd you do your lightsabers in? You got some funky fanning going on there :P

[PostaL]

The sabers have been done in 3ds max (i know there is a better way but i realy like the motion blur from 3ds on the sabers).We are now working on doing it animated with cammera motion and that will take us some time. We are now trying to put our hand on a trial version of MatchMover for the camerra tracking, becouse the cammera tracker from 3ds is a big pain in the a... had :D .

[kaz]

can you go thru the process of what did u do to the original footage to leave space for the matte? i mean did u mask and if so how did u get the tree to see thru the branches?

[DMPjedi]

Sure, I'll be able to do that when I get home. I'm at school now. I did a lot of vector paint for the mattes as I mentioned up above.

[DMPjedi]

Okay, here's kinda a summary of how I'm going about doing these shots. First off, I basically follow this sky replacement tutorial (http://www.martin-sfx.de/english/skyreplacement.html) for how to arrange the layers for the actual sky replacement. I exclude some of the last steps with the 200 and 100 blurring, it doesn't always work out too well. I'll just focus on some of the things I personally do to make this work on the shots I have.

First off, like in the tutorial, I desaturate and adjust the levels. I only focus on the trees here, allowing full whites and full blacks but not eating away the branches a whole lot. Like so:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/dmpjedi/tut_lv.jpg

But as you can see, there's all kinds of detail in the foreground that are still very white (I'm using mattes where the white is transparent, and black is solid, I just use opposite transfer modes than a normal matte) that will show the sky through later. So I use Vector Paint and paint black into the foreground by hand, frame by frame. This particular shot was easier, there's others that have finer details that are harder, like motion blurred hands against the sky *shudder* Anyway, here's the Vector Painting:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/dmpjedi/tut_vp.jpg

Here's the sky added in without a gradient ramp so you can see the matte working. I'm still experimenting with some atmospherics and there's none showing in this image.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/dmpjedi/tut_rep.jpg

Here, you can see the gradient applied with the footage in front of the sky. The original footage has been color corrected to night. What you can see is I end up with all these white outlines from the original sky where the matte was softened up a little bit. So I chose to adjust the curves. Basically what I end up doing is changing that white outline to a black outline. On a shot such as this one, you don't really notice, but there's other shots against a brighter nebula or something where you can see the black outline, but it doesn't pop out at you like the white :P

This is my general curve I use, with slight variation from shot to shot.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/dmpjedi/tut_curves.jpg

And after the curves:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/dmpjedi/tut_sky.jpg

Then I render that out and plop some lightsabers onto it and BAM!
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/dmpjedi/tut_final.jpg

____________________________________

This post should go along side that tutorial I linked to above. If there's a question about something I did, it's probably in there. If you still have questions, don't hesitate to ask, I have nothing else to do but stare at this thread until there's a reply :P

Again, I'm still working out some atmospherics. I'd like some input on the gradient thing I'm doing and if you think that's enough. I'm all ears for some advice :D

I feel like I'm forgeting something...I dunno. Comments, questions, advice?

[DMPjedi]

Okay, my cousin and I reshot this duel today with better choreography and a cooler location. But I'm curious as I'm about to start the sky replacement (btw, I'm probably doing some other sky), how would I approach a shot like this?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v608/dmpjedi/nvc_new.gif

Yuk, what a dirty lens :P