Digital Compositor

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Nibirus

April 30th 2010

Full video coming here very soon!

Approximately 60 years in the future a meteorite has collided with planet Earth, covering it in a blanket of dust causing perpetual darkness. Life as we know it has been wiped out. The last human survivors communicate remotely. Jack’s outpost, Station 13, is contacted from headquarters.

Nibirus Before & After Shot 1

Figure I & II: Raw plate & final composite of shot 1

Nibirus Before & After Shot 2

Figure III & IV: Raw plate & final composite of shot 2

The project was apart of my degree. Three final year students (including myself) were placed together to lead three second years. The three final years have different specialised areas. In this example that was compositing (myself), 3D and physical props/set creator. This requires communication and team work. The team have never worked together.

Thankfully, I had an excellent team with great communication. From a compositing point of view, the team were very aware of what I needed and limitations and what problems could arise. I’ve credited them all at the bottom of the page. The aim was to create a 20 second piece in based in a decayed city. Some brain storming later, we came up with project Nibirus.

Process

Organisation

As a third year one of my roles was to organise the team and represent the compositors needs, so I’ll briefly mention the process. Weekly meetings were held so everyone knew what had been done, needed to be done and what problems had occurred. It was my role to prevent problems in  production that would create issues in post. Knowing clean plates would be needed, for example.

Concept

Nibirus Research Mood Board

Figure V: Mood board

The team all contributed their own concept art and mood boards. The benefit was the group produced a group idea, but also allowed everyone imagine the final shot in their mind.

Nibirus Colour Swatches

Figure VI: Colour theme swatches

Interface Design

While the team, especially the physical department, were in production for filming I had time to prepare for post production and create the computer interface. I began by researching different styles and fonts. I used the same orange and brown tones from the colour palette (while avoiding  trying to avoid coffee filter colours).

The actor had to interact with the interface. I calculated the sort of movements and created a rough animation. Then, once filmed, I moved key frames on the time line to align. The best way for me to break the interface down for you is to let you watch it. Take a look at the render below (watch on Vimeo for higher quality).

Nibirus Interface from Liam Major on Vimeo

The interface was made a 4:3 aspect ratio to match the physical screen on set. This would be composited onto the real screen by keying the green (to give the alpha of the actors hand). If you consider its size on screen, it only covers 100 pixels or so. I created at 1024×768 resolution, which again matched the real screen. I designed it to be able to loop by avoiding key frames and used expressions. To gain inspiration I investigated current interfaces, concept future interfaces and films such as Minority Report.

Nibirus Keyboard Design

Figure VII: Keyboard design

I designed some interface sections, such as the keyboard shown above, within Photoshop. I created all these parts individually so I could bring them into after Effects, creation a composition and animated each part, such as individual keyboard keys. The interface included a keyboard, clock, bar charts, vital readings, map and other widgets. All these components animated, the clock in fact actually worked as a real clock (with script). Any desktop that was only briefly shown was just filled with lorem ipsum text.

The interface was designed to be the inside of a cube. The user flicks the touch screen to move to a different cube face, which is a different desktop. Each desktop had different software and information displayed. The user can also dock their smart phone, connected to their body, and monitor their vitals on screen. The user can also drag files from the computer screen to the smart phone visually.

Nibirus Interface

Figure VIII: After Effects composition screenshots

I created a 3D space in After Effects and made a cube using 5 flat precompositions, all with the same background. I used a camera within the cube and animated its rotation to flick between faces. The cameras movement was smoothed using the curve editor to ease in and out. I created all the content and animated it, so comment for in depth detail.

Filming

With a lot of emphasis on team work, all the team was present for shooting.

I recorded all the information about the set to recreate it in 3D. While I was doing that, other members of the team were taking photographs for reference and textures. The camera was locked on a tripod (its position recorded & photographed) with the intention of adding shake in post.

We planned on making a hologram to come out of the computer. To get realistic lighting on the actor, we decided to place a monitor in the same position as the hologram to emit the orange light. This would need to be painted out. To get the right information needed to paint it out we removed the monitor and recorded a clean plate. I used this plate to cut out and place over the monitor in post. I also used the same clean plate to generate a matte of the whole actor using a difference key (more on this in the compositing section).

Nibirus Rig Removal

Figure IX: Clean plate & rig removal

The top monitor changed to green when the actor moved in front of it. This was so I could key it and get an alpha. I would say in hindsight using a light source as the green screen isn’t the best solution, at least for this project.  Because it emitted light it caused a lot of green spill. In fact it was hard to distinguish what was screen and what was the actor in parts. Maybe due to the age, quality or viewing angle of the monitor it often appeared more cyan than green. Moving the monitor further away from the subject would have reduced spill but wasn’t possible in this case.

Compositing

The first thing I did was remove the monitor rig, shown in figure IX. Next, I needed to create a matte for the actor, mainly his head, to place him on top of the painted out rig. For this I used a difference key. A difference key takes two images and generates a matte by calculating the difference (as the name suggests). Therefore it is best to get as much contrast with the foreground object and background. The key caused issues with white coat being too similar to the background and the shadow from the actor. The orange collar and head gave me a solid key for the head, which is what was needed.

Another thing I did was animate the shaft on the right of the composition. We couldn’t get it to move in real life, not at least with the time frame. I created a poly around the edge to separate it. I then used an expression to animate its position up and down. A second matte was used (that didn’t animate) to make it appear as if it was going into the bottom cylinder. Within Photoshop I cloned the environment around it to create the background wall.

I added other effects around the room. Firstly five monitors on the right wall. These were renders from the interface design but created to loop. Obviously there were no real monitors there which meant there was no lighting on the set. I created it with a colour correction. I considered specular highlights, reflections and shadows caused by the monitor. Text was added to the wall, which I masked to appear like it was pealing with the wall paint. I also animated some text (within After Effects) and positioned it on top of the calculator. The two metal pillars on either side of the computer were extended (cloned in Photoshop), shown in figure IX.

Nibirus Before & After Colour Correction

Figure X: Before & after colour grading

As for the hologram itself. This was made by building up layers of solid objects. Solid objects are their After Effects name, Fusion would call them backgrounds. They had varying hue, intensity and feathered edges building up out of the core. The same method was used to create lens flare from the emitter. The hologram emitter core is white, following the colour temperature rules.

This compositing had the heaviest amount of colour grading compared to most of my projects. I began with lighting. The room is meant to be dark with no natural light. I darkened the edges to make it feel like the hologram and monitors were the only light sources. I then lifted the gain and gamma around the area the hologram emitted. The corrections balanced the shot and drew the eye line to the center. Lastly I gave the composition the orange tint as envisioned in preproduction with the mood boards. I created 12 different variations of orange shade for the group to study to get the correct tone.

There’s probably more to say on the subject, but that should paint a general picture. Thanks and leave a comment below.

Comments

  • neel_ru

    24 Jul, 6 o′clock

    it was very interesting to read.
    I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
    And you et an account on Twitter?

  • Liam Major

    24 Jul, 1 o′clock

    Sure you can, feel free.
    And thanks
    Twitter user name is ‘LiamMajor’, although I need to get tweeting

  • s_my_le

    1 Aug, 5 o′clock

    I would like to exchange links with your site liammajor.com
    Is this possible?

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