Color Correction

All the shots almost involve color correction as they are shots from 5 different cameras at 3 different locations and on different days, to make them seems to blend together and cut seamlessly.

A typical day for night shot.

For greenscreen, 5K footage from RED camera gives more flexiblity to re-frame in post. A single shot can be used to cut between wide and closeup, reducing the number of shoots and thus saving production time by half.

Greenscreen footage

Crowd replication with simulated depth of field

 

Color corrected footage

 

As the wind is blowing the female talents, the shot was captured in 120fps, otherwise all the motion of the fabric and hair will be too fast. The framerate for all other actors were shot with normal rates, which makes her standout in front of the crowd.

Compositing

Here are some of the passes used to render the final shots.

Motion Vector pass

 

Ambient Occlusion pass

 

CG Smoke

 

CG Particles

 

The original plate was shot on a moving car at 60km/h with a shutter speed of 1/50 which does not gives a nice motion blur. However, that's the speed limit in Singapore, so can't do much.

 

 

 

The footage was sped up 400% so it's equivalent to about 240km/h footage and with added motion blur, it's pretty much looks like shot on a high speed vehicle.

 



And here's the final composite. An animated HDRI was used for the environment lights to gives the moving reflection on the car surface.

Similar techniques were used for other shots.

 

Texturing, Lighting and Rendering

After layout, proceeded to texture, light and render of the F1 car.

Normal maps were use on the tires instead of bump maps.

And here's the test render.

As all the renders are working fine, proceed to light and composite the final render.

Layout

Have done some layout for shot04b which is the car zooming off.

3D tracking was done and a mockup car was put in place to test the tracks. I found that inputing the lens information really helps the solve.

Principle Photography for "Live Louder Than Life"

I have change the project name to "Live Louder Than Life".

Finally I have got the permission to film at F1 track. For this, I need to get approval from Singapore Tourism Board, Jurong International which governs to Pit Building, Nparks for the tracks and Singapore Flyer. The process was taking too long to approve and I have to push back my production schedule a bit. Update production schedule is here.

Below is some shots from the principle photography.

 

 

With so shallow depth of field on some closeup shot, will be rendering lots of zdepth in the 3D passes.

Next up, layout!

 

Look Dev Part 3 - Linear workflow revisit

At this point I think is best to setup a robust and organized system for the lighting and compositing workflow in my final project. Therefore I have use the fruit scene as a test bed.

Went to Bishan park to do another Look Dev. For the 360 spherical map, I used a rectilinear lens as I found it stitched better.

Here's the spherical map and the back plate.

I also took the gray cube for calibrating the exposure with 18% gray value. In maya, created a material with 18% gray, 95% white and 5% black and superblack to match the actual gray cube. Done some environment map with setting adjusted to match the live action gray cube plate.

From the comparison, using a 5x5 sampling, the live action gray cube is reading RGB value of 99, 99, 95 and the CG cube on the left after adjustment to the environment map reads 100, 100, 98. The CG cube was rendered in linear color space and output as sRGB to match the live action plate.

With the CG scene setup to match the live action plate, I can put in the fruits scene and added a few lights for artistics purposes. And here's the final render.

Look Dev Part 2 - Lighting test

The purpose of this look dev is to get an idea of how the actual lighting on set. As my scenes are all in the night, it will be good to do a lighting test for night shot too.

So here's the fish eye image.

And here's the LatLong map.

The HDR image was taken with 8mm lens and therefore only need single row and 4 angles with 90 degree apart. For those who doing own HDR image, do remember to set the camera to aperture priority and quickly do the exposure bracketing as not to let the lighting change too much. I noticed the Flyer's position has change a bit after a few exposure and is hard to capture a sharp image but guess I have to live with it. Here's the formula to calculate the minumum number of angle to shoot for panoscan.

where,

a = angle of panorama
Y% = percentage of overlapping image
Xmm = focal length (with 35mm equilavalent conversion)

I tweak the material shader a bit. And here's the final composite.

I'm not so worry about the glass reflection as my final 3D car will not have glass, so I have left the glass adjustment out.

Look Dev Part 1 - Lighting test

Here's my VFX production workflow. There's a lot of different ways, but I think I will somehow follow this approach.

So I decided to do a test for the lights and rendering, since my story consist of a car, and obviously there's a lot of reflections. I went to Upper Pierce Reservoir to do the test for a very simple reason, that there aren't many people there. I don't want to have 'ghost' image of people walking around in my reflection. And here's the LatLong map.

It's a HDR image so I tonemapped for posting here in the blog. Good thing is the overcast sky so I don't have to cast hard shadow. To get a complete reflection in all direction, I need to get 360 degree map.

And here' the background plate.

The scene is lit entirely by the hdr image. I also turn off the default light. Fresnel was used to get the facing angle reflections. So here's the final render with the CG car.

A close inspection on the reflection at the rear of the car where it is facing the reservoir shows good reflectivity compared to the side door, which is correct.

Although the shadow a bit black, but I think that can be fixed in comp as this exercise is to test the IBL for the effects.

Shotsheet and previz for the project

A shot sheet gives me a list of shots from which to choose to illustrate story.  It allows me to visualize the story in such a way as to use the video in the most effective way.  It also allows me to breakdown the visual effects shot involved. Each shot has its own technical difficulty.

Digital previsualization is merely technology applied to the visual plan for a motion picture. I used Pre-visualization (also known as pre-vis, pre vis, pre viz, pre-viz, previs, or animatics) to describe the storyboard in which digital technology aids the planning and efficiency of shot creation during the filmmaking process.

Storyboard for the project. Basically the story is about a logo which transform into a Formula One car and zoom by different area of the city. As it pass by one person, the speed of it shatter the glass of his spec. Shattering of glass on building can be seen when the car passes by. Both shots require dynamics and particles effects.

Green screen elements for the talents has been shot on 3rd June. Here's the basic setup of the studio.

And here's the greenscreen setup.

For those who are familiar with cinematography, proper greenscreen exposure should be 1/4 stop. And to get maximum saturation, the IRE level on a waveform monitor and vectorscope should be about IRE55. On a RED Epic camera, which has 12bit resolution and full chroma sub sampling, the color temperature can be controlled in post using metadata. I used daylight balanced kino-flo for actors and tungsten for back light. Some of the shots are filmed at 300 frames per second, so the lights really plays a part.

Start of project

Start of project blogging here.