Green Screen Fun

[Grant Carden]

http://www.cardenfilms.com/flip.mov

Early test...enjoy!

[Paul R Johnson]

very often I'm disappointed by the links - but this is rather nice. So, what's it for and how did you do it?

[Josh Chesarek]

Very Nicely done! Going to guess a Matchbox car and your hand covered in Green :)

[Ervin Farkas]

Very good for a start! Now think of a way to convince the viewer that it was not a Matchbox - you have to make it stop from rocking back and forth as a heavy real car would not do that.

[Terry Lee]

so wait....that was done with a model car?

That was honestly really good!

[Jurgen Geevels]

idd, great clip

The only thing that makes it a bit unrealistic is the fact that the car shakes a bit fast when he's turned over

[Philip Gioja]

That's pretty cool! I like it.

I did see a string or fishing line at the very end after watching it ten times or so.

[Alessandro Garabaghi]

just noticed that as well =P... maybe a little PS...

[Jim Andrada]

Really neat!

One thing that gives it away is that the bottom of a real car is not a flat piece with some molded projections. If you could have it come to rest with the bottom tipped away from the viewer a bit so that the bottom of the car wasn't clearly visible, then I think aside from the period of the roll and oscillations, the illusion would be damn near perfect. (I wonder if you could pry the bottom off and put a few fishing sinkers inside on the side that's going to wind up away from the camera? This might also add some irregularity to the roll as well)

I remember an article in American Cinematographer in the early 60's when they used 20 foot long model ships for filming naval battles that talked about issues with scaling the frame rate so a 10 foot mast that was supposedly 100 feet high would take a few seconds to fall down in order to keep the illusion of size.

But in spite of a few minor "opportunities for improvement" it was great. Good job!

[Grant Carden]

Thanks guys! Here is the uncomposited shot...

http://www.cardenfilms.com/car.mov


I had a hard time keying because of the relflections on the car. I shot it at 48fps, but perhaps I should go to 60fps?

A normal car would crush a bit too...I wonder how I could make it do that?

Thanks for the advice,

Grant

[Ervin Farkas]

Originally Posted by Grant Carden

A normal car would crush a bit too...I wonder how I could make it do that?

It depends on the script. I suspect what happens here is some supernatural force throwing that car upside down. If that's the case, I would swith to a different camera angle the moment it first hits the ground, perhaps to someone looking at that car flipping over.

[Grant Carden]

http://www.cardenfilms.com/flip2.mov

Almost finished...

[Jim Andrada]

I think the best way to find a realistic frame rate is trial and error.

If the car were just falling through the air, it woud be fairly easy to compute the factor by which the frame rate would have to be sped up. I made a rough calculation that if the model car were 1/100 scale and falling 1 foot, then in order to get the same effect as a real car falling 100 feet filmed at 30 fps, you'd need to film at 300 fps.

But for the tumbling motion, it's really hard to make a scale calculation because you'd have to know the actual forces acting on a real car from the explosion or whatever caused it to tumble and then apply the same forces to the model. Quite impractical I think.

I had also thought about the crushing effect, but then again you'd also need breaking window glass to make it look authentic. Considering the relative sizes of real and model cars, and the thickness of the cast metal of the model, getting any kind of crushing will be really tough - the model car won't crush in aything like the pattern the real car would exhibit.

Probably the suggestion from Ervin would be most convincing.

[Grant Carden]

In the spirit of Cloverfield...

http://www.cardenfilms.com/flip3.mov

[Allen Plowman]

I love it!!!