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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
World’s Only “Death Oompah” Band Gets Virtual Reality Music Video
Art Adams | 11/10
The Tiger Lillies sail to a virtual arctic wasteland for their new album “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
The Tiger Lillies don’t pay money for their promotional work. Instead, they pay artistically. They give free reign to whoever offers to do the work. This has led to the occasional surprise. (In this case it will be a very happy one.)
Mark sent me the following Quicktime videos as a reference to the project’s look:
The bottom clip shows Mark standing in for the ship’s captain, who, in the “Rime” and the song, plunges his crew into a living hell while trying to kill an albatross.
These clips gave me a good idea of the look Mark was going for, and I noted that the light source was soft, had some contrast, and came from the right side of frame. Knowing that there was only so much I could do with our small crew I asked Mark if I could use the same rough look for the beginning of the piece, which takes place on a gazebo at dusk. He said yes, so I formulated a cunning lighting plan:
The platform doubles as our ship’s deck and gazebo floor, and the only real surface that appears in the video. Against the far wall is a 12’x12’ Ultrabounce, lit with both 4k and 6k HMI PARs. The diffusion material in front of it is Half Soft Frost, which softens the bounced light further and makes the Ultrabounce appear larger and very evenly lit. (PARs almost never create an even spread of light across a bounce surface, so the additional layer of diffusion smooths out the hot spots. Half Soft Frost is very thin, almost like shower curtain, and absorbs almost no light.) We put the Ultrabounce fairly far away so that its light would drop off less across the platform.
To the right of the Ultrabounce is our “fill from the key side,” a 12’x12’ bounce consisting of a layer of bleached muslin on top of a 12’x12’ griffolyn. Griffloyn is shiny and can create specular “hits,” so covering it with muslin gives it a matte finish. Muslin alone is transparent and needs a backing to make sure all the light bounces forward instead of some escaping out the back.
I love filling from the key side. Filling opposite the key creates two tones: a bright “key” side and a darker “fill” side, while filling from the same side as the key extends the key and wraps it around the subject, creating a much wider range of tones. In essence it creates the impression of a larger key source. It also “hides” in the shadow of the key and frequently doesn’t reveal itself as a separate source. If it does, I feel it to be much more pleasing to have two soft shadows falling in the same direction, as might occur in a room with two windows next to each other on a wall, rather than one shadow falling one direction and another falling in the complete opposite direction, which feels very “lit” to me.
On the left is an 8’x8’ frame of muslin, providing a base fill opposite the key to boost the darkest shadows to a minimum level. A12’x20’ green screen is rigged behind the stage. This is the biggest screen that we could reasonably use in the space, and we shot off the edges a lot. Mark said that he wasn’t terribly worried about shooting off the screen as the platform’s straight edges would be fairly easy to track.
We used Build 20 on a RED ONE, set at EI 320 but rated at EI 160. (I tried setting the camera to EI 160, having habitually rated the RED at Ei 160 but never actually encoding that into the metadata, but the resulting image appeared too dark on the director’s monitor.) I habitually rate the RED at EI 160 to crush shadow noise, and while others rate it at 200 or 250 I feel more comfortable giving it a full stop of additional exposure light. I’ve had very good results so far, but it makes interiors awkward as producers are not used to budgeting for that amount of light. In this case, with a total of 10,000w of HMI light plowing into the Ultrabounce, I got a whopping T3.5 on my meter. As I wanted the flesh tones to pop a little we shot at T2.8 for most setups. (The key side fill was T2.4, and the opposite side fill read T1.2.)
Except for one shot, everything was lit for 5600k daylight. I set the camera shutter to 1/60th, not so much to avoid flicker (all lights were on flicker-free ballasts) but to slightly reduce motion blur and make keying and rotoscoping easier.
Here’s the opening shot, of the band playing on a gazebo at a wedding:
And here’s a moving test composite. There’s a lot of cleanup that has to be done here, but that’s what happens on low-budget VFX shoots: we shoot first and worry about details later. Normally that just adds to the post budget, but given that the director is going to do a significant amount of post work himself, and is having quite a bit of success enlisting post houses to donate their time toward building his reel, it made sense to work quickly and get everything in the digital “can” than to spend long hours making everything perfect and taking excessive advantage of the crew’s goodwill.
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