Post-Production & Visual Effects

This is the first post to the blog in a long time because we've been focusing on finishing the movie.  We are happy to report that principal photography is wrapped on Hookman: Redemption!

Now begins the long process of editing, visual effects, and audio mix for the film.  In this Hookman movie, we've really stepped our game up in terms of visual effects.  Hookman: Requiem had a grand total of three greenscreen shots - meaning actors were shot against a green screen and composited into existing footage to achieve a desired effect.  Bonus points if you can name all three.

Now, in Hookman: Redemption, we eat simple greenscreen shots for breakfast.  This week we're going to look at a shot where we put an entire car on a greenscreen stage inside a studio, shot a dialogue sequence on steadicam, then composited it to make it look as if the car were driving on a bright sunny day.  Let's break that down a bit to show how complicated it is.

wow, we're getting fancy

Step 1: Shoot the stuff.  In this case, it's four people talking in a car, pretending to drive.  We used a steadicam to shoot the opening shot of the scene because we're awesome.  That means the camera is seemingly floating around the car while it's driving.

Step 2: Remove the "green" from the background and replace it with what you want.  This is where we stopped in Hookman: Requiem, and can be fairly complicated.  But in this new shot, the hardest parts are ahead.

what the turd?

Step 3: Track the camera in 3D.  In order to make a shot look realistic that has a 'floating camera,' we need to create a virtual camera in 3D that moves EXACTLY the same way the real camera did.  This is impossible to do by hand because it has to be very precise.  We run it through a 3D camera tracking program that picks out hundreds of small details in the frame then tracks each one through the entire shot to reverse-engineer the camera move in a virtual environment (huh?).

Step 4: Backgrounds. So now we've got the car cut out from the green screen, and the virtual camera move matched.  For the background of the shot, we want the car driving on a nice country road.  So we physically go out and shoot 360 degrees around a nice country road while driving.  This required rigging a camera to shoot out of the trunk, side door, and on the hood of a minivan while driving 40 mph.  We shot this roughly six months after shooting the original car in the studio.


Step 5: Build the virtual world.  Now we bring those 2D background plates into the 3D world and line them up so they're seamless.  Do some final color tweaking, add a lens flare and some motion blur, and the shot is good to go!

I may have lost you after step one.  That's okay because you don't have to really worry about it.  If the visual effect succeeds, you'll never even realize it was a greenscreen shot anyway.  Hopefully you'll just watch the film and say to yourself, "Oh, they're driving down a nice country road, isn't that lovely."  

This shot took roughly 10 hours to get it to a "good enough for Hookman" quality level.  Watch the video to check out the original footage and the various stages it goes through to get to the final shot (watch it in HD or suffer the consequences):