Visual effects and special camera movements : some theory

yeah, i was only thinking of some of them. some of those other ones i think you could cheat, but it would be TONS of work, 2d & 3d. like that one of the kid standing in the snow. i think i could cheat that, but it would take a lot of work. things like that girl getting out of the car would be pretty easy though.

would you just use multiple instances of the frames and key the opacity ? not sure about how you would handle this . a tutorial would be nice ehhe.

i would have the actors stand as absolutely still as possible, then take 3 or 4 quick stills. then roto each thing individually (arm, head, legs, everything in the scene, etc) and use something like Elastic Reality or Twixtor (i HATE twixtor, though) to create the inbetweens. it would work, i've done that sort of thing on movies in the past, but sometimes a single shot will take a month of work. the snow would obviously be all CG. i know the new warping engine in AE is probably advanced enough to do it, as well, i just don't know if AE will let you put in control/reference splines the way Elastic Reality and Twixtor do. i don't think AE's warping tool lets you put in reference splines. i mean, you can do individual roto'ed sections, but ER and twixtor let you put in open splines specifically for matching up begin/end points.

i don't have ER at home, and its been discontinued for a long time, so i can't really show how to do that one. but i could maybe fudge something together using what i have. i don't know, we'll see.

oh, i just reread what you wrote and realized you were probably asking about the woman getting out of the car, not the kid standing in the snow. yeah, i'd shoot her on a greenscreen, it'd be pretty easy using ghosted frames, varying opacities, etc. the only thing that looks really hard about that shot is that the flashed stills of the woman are changing perspective as the camera moves, after they've stopped moving. that would be hard, probably impossible with one video camera.

hmmmm... you could make 3d geometry of the woman in all the flashed poses and project the pictures on to it - then you'd have perspective changing! 3d track your greenscreen footage, and BAM! done! (well, it would be tons of work, but there it is in theory...)

does that all make sense?

see, anything's possible! Max + Photoshop + After Effects = whatever you want!

yeah i was refering to the shot of the woman coming out of the car . but i dont mind lol . thanks a lot for elaborating on the process i've seen tutorials where these kinds of things have been hacked using morphs and such but i really doubt that you can get a seamless look from it but then again you're the expert i mean you've actually done this stuff for movies :O so i guess theres no arguing hehe .

i certainly wouldn't say i'm an expert, its just that i've done some things like that a couple times. and it doesn't always work, it only works in specific instances where the camera angles all lend themselves to the process... basically, the planets have to be in perfect alignment and you have to sacrifice a chicken!

its would be hard to get a perfectly "seamless" look to it, but having all those copies behind her being transparent certainly would help hide alot of the issues, and also having them overlap the way they do. and again, it would probably take a month of endless roto'ing. and twixtor completely sucks (just my opinion), but is unfortunately the only tool being supported right now to do complex morphs and warps, so bending it to do your bidding is a chore and a half. Elastic Reality was tons easier, faster, and had better tools.

hmm i thought tixtor was a time remapping plugin ..

it is, but it warps things to create inbetween frames if you're slowing footage down. if you have a few still images, you can create a sequence by warping one image to the other over a specified frame range. AE can do this too, but twixtor allows you to put in "guide" splines, whereas AE only lets you use "border" splines. With AE's stock tool, the pixels inside that border spline just take the computed route to line up with where they should be in the target spline position. In twixtor, you can put in extra splines that aren't "borders", just reference points. if you were doing a sleeved arm, you could put in a few guide splines where there are major wrinkles in the fabric, and it will interpret the inbetweens MUCH more realistically.

using 2 images from different perspectives, if their guides lines are set up properly, can look like an actual 3d object. well, sometimes. you can get that perspective shift into it a little.

but twixtor seriously destroys everything outside of that border spline you create, which forces you to do every single part of your image as seperate passes, which takes a long time.

nice thanks alot for sharing man greatly appreciated