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Wednesday 5 January 2011

Scene 2 test 01


A quick pass to get a better sense of timing and camera angle with a placeholder carriage. In the finished shot the camera starts at the front of the train and ends up at the very rear, so the train will be travelling a little faster.

5 comments:

  1. Kieran, it's looking stuuuuunning. :D Really like the speed of the zoom in towards the back at the end, it's dead on - I can HEAR the music playing in my head. Masterful, as always. :P

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  2. It looks good! My only criticism is that it feels very "3d" and I don't mean visually as such, the camera move itself is, especially around 13-14 seconds in.
    If you watch some of the newest series of Family Guy, and to a certain extent newer Futurama they have a lot of shots with a similar feel that seem out of place. Almost as if they are forcing a shot to be 3d, simply because they can. Shots like this can almost make the camera feel a bit lost and wandery because they're too long.
    You could/should try a version that cuts after we lose the train behind the moutain, it could switch to a perfect bird's eye view, or possibly even jump to the other side of the train, and then catch up to this current camera around 20-21 seconds.

    Just my 2 cents,

    Paul.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Paul, thanks for your comment. We definitely want to avoid 3Dishness in the camera movement, the overall film should feel more cinematographic in the way it is filmed.

    Although we will used captured camera movement in other scenes, lending authenticity to this "helicopter" shot is a little trickier! At the moment it suffers from the camera being parented and aimed at the carriage, which produces an unnatural smooth motion.

    The path and pacing of the camera definitely needs more weight and consistency. Also some rotational movement needs added to the camera (hopefully captured) to add more realism and immediacy to the framing.

    The movement of the falcon across the frame and the full length train need added before this timing is locked down.

    I like the idea of cutting away and back to break up the wander, but maybe this won't be necessary / possible once the action of the falcon is added. We also considered flying a title in here which could use up otherwise aimless screen time, not sure about this though. We can always try it with an extra cut.

    Cheers, keep sending us your thoughts!
    Kieran

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nae danger!
    One solution to your following camera troubles would be to bake out the motion from the parent (it would be need to be a constraint and not a direct parent). This would mean your camera made exactly the same motion but that you were free to tweak the curves. You would need to simplify (sparse bake I think the option is) the resulting curves from the bake as they would put a key every frame and that's a bit of a 'mare to adjust.

    An alternative would be to group the camera, and parent the group to the train, which would leave the camera's translate/rotate clean and free for offsets and adjustments.

    On a pedantic side note, the blurb to the left of this page has a capital "L" in Flying Duchess where there doesn't need to be one. A timely amendment of this oversight would help me sleep better.

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete


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