A few ways to execute this come to mind, all of them are pretty tedious and After Effects intensive.
My initial thought to get the jerky/stop motion look would be to shoot regular footage, keep every 5th frame of video (or so), still each frame (right click on clip, select "time", "freeze frame")then extend each single still frame to run about 3 or four frames (Or more).
Then go back to each still and mask out your talent. Repeat the first step for the background scene. They use a series of animated masks and positioning keyframes to bring in the background piece by piece.
Treat with some flares, kick the "curves" on an adjustment layer and voilà, promo magic.
The most important part is the attention to detail on the masking and the frame you decide to still. Notice how the talent always looks good, there are no awkward or unappealing face gestures.
We shot it using the 'rapid' fire mode of our Canon 5D at a shutter speed of 60. Each frame is a hi-res jpeg. First, we shot each scene of the talent and immediate extras on green...all hand-held in a backwards z-space motion. Then, we went back and shot the backplate environments in the exact same way and path. We then shot a few extra foreground 'transition' elements. Each bkgd was then chopped up to provide a 'morphing' style transition, offset from the talent's change of scene so it didn't look like a traditional wholesale morph. We then added some color filters and the 'JJ Abrams' style lens flare effects for good measure. We were hoping for a unique visual that told a good story about our talent. They were a lot of fun to produce and I was happy with the way they turned out. It started out as a simple experiment in the hallway of our dept and eventually became this campaign. Thanks all for the feedback! I love seeing all your spots on here too!
Hey there...our green screen wasn't big enough either...we had to go to a nearby production studio where they had a green wall and floor for us to really move around in. I think that's what made the spot feel more organic...rather than put the anchor on a treadmill and avoid shooting feet...which we seriously considered at first! There's no doubt more than one way to do it...but that's the way we felt worked out best for us. Thanks again! BTW, I have a producer opening here in Dallas if you all know of anyone! ;)
On the after effects side this was time consuming. I started off by doing color correction right off the top to get the look right. Then David and I had to work out the frame rate to what he shot. The most time consuming parts were the transitions from scene to scene. We offset the Anchor shots vs Background shots to where they did not happen exactly at the same time. I took the beginning or Ending frame of the background plates and brought them into PhotoShop. I spent many hours cutting out different parts (ex: airplane) and rebuilding the background by repainting it in manually. There was a lot of Rotoscoping and Keying adjustments as I went along. The sky was replaced in almost every shot. To give it a more surreal feel of separation, some of the sky replacements had a foggy feel too them. Last i worked on transitions for the anchor. The first one was actually very simple. I went outside and took a picture of one of the live trucks with my iPhone and cleaned it up in PhotoShop. I then cut it out and that is what I used. One thing that took a while is that one of the kids on the scooters had a shirt on that was really close to the chroma key green. I had to go in and change the color frame by frame to make sure and get a clean key. Over all this spot was really neat to work on. It turned out great from the initial idea that it started out as.
7 comments:
HOW DO THEY DO THAT?
A few ways to execute this come to mind, all of them are pretty tedious and After Effects intensive.
My initial thought to get the jerky/stop motion look would be to shoot regular footage, keep every 5th frame of video (or so), still each frame (right click on clip, select "time", "freeze frame")then extend each single still frame to run about 3 or four frames (Or more).
Then go back to each still and mask out your talent. Repeat the first step for the background scene. They use a series of animated masks and positioning keyframes to bring in the background piece by piece.
Treat with some flares, kick the "curves" on an adjustment layer and voilà, promo magic.
The most important part is the attention to detail on the masking and the frame you decide to still. Notice how the talent always looks good, there are no awkward or unappealing face gestures.
We shot it using the 'rapid' fire mode of our Canon 5D at a shutter speed of 60. Each frame is a hi-res jpeg. First, we shot each scene of the talent and immediate extras on green...all hand-held in a backwards z-space motion. Then, we went back and shot the backplate environments in the exact same way and path. We then shot a few extra foreground 'transition' elements. Each bkgd was then chopped up to provide a 'morphing' style transition, offset from the talent's change of scene so it didn't look like a traditional wholesale morph. We then added some color filters and the 'JJ Abrams' style lens flare effects for good measure. We were hoping for a unique visual that told a good story about our talent. They were a lot of fun to produce and I was happy with the way they turned out. It started out as a simple experiment in the hallway of our dept and eventually became this campaign. Thanks all for the feedback! I love seeing all your spots on here too!
Thanks guys, nice to learn something on the blog in addition to being inspired!
Dave -
How big is your green screen? Even with just a few steps we'd be off screen.
Hey there...our green screen wasn't big enough either...we had to go to a nearby production studio where they had a green wall and floor for us to really move around in. I think that's what made the spot feel more organic...rather than put the anchor on a treadmill and avoid shooting feet...which we seriously considered at first! There's no doubt more than one way to do it...but that's the way we felt worked out best for us. Thanks again! BTW, I have a producer opening here in Dallas if you all know of anyone! ;)
On the after effects side this was time consuming. I started off by doing color correction right off the top to get the look right. Then David and I had to work out the frame rate to what he shot. The most time consuming parts were the transitions from scene to scene. We offset the Anchor shots vs Background shots to where they did not happen exactly at the same time. I took the beginning or Ending frame of the background plates and brought them into PhotoShop. I spent many hours cutting out different parts (ex: airplane) and rebuilding the background by repainting it in manually. There was a lot of Rotoscoping and Keying adjustments as I went along. The sky was replaced in almost every shot. To give it a more surreal feel of separation, some of the sky replacements had a foggy feel too them.
Last i worked on transitions for the anchor. The first one was actually very simple. I went outside and took a picture of one of the live trucks with my iPhone and cleaned it up in PhotoShop. I then cut it out and that is what I used. One thing that took a while is that one of the kids on the scooters had a shirt on that was really close to the chroma key green. I had to go in and change the color frame by frame to make sure and get a clean key. Over all this spot was really neat to work on. It turned out great from the initial idea that it started out as.
-J-
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