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Poor man’s Motion Control : Jet Fly By
October 2003 Quicktime Tutorial Series
Mike Seymour

In this new series of tutorials we cover a bunch of small tips and quick tricks and, as you requested, we have made them as short easy to download quicktime movies.

Below is a test we did to show the benefits of mixed resolutions in version 5.x/8.x of inferno, but many of the principles apply equally to any compositing package.

The aim is to have a Jet fighter do a low fly by over our camera.

The total budget for this shot was $168.00 which was entirely spent on the model kit plane we bought from a local toy store.

The shoot was done in my front yard with a small $1000 Sony 3 Megapixel digital stills camera and an old record player. (Note: the quality of the blue screen – it is so hard to get good visual effects supervisors on set these days !)

STEPS:

1. Build the model plane,

2. shoot the model with a domestic 3 Megapixel stills camera – using a cool ‘poor man’s motion control rig’ technqiue we developed,

3. shoot a series of stills and stitch them together to produce a huge – high resolution matte painting. (We use RealViz Stitcher – a great program that runs on OSX).

4. Composite the plane with some heat haze, camera shake and simple animation.

The important thing to note is that such things were possible before version 5/8 of inferno – but it was a huge pain to tile up a huge matte painting, now with version 5/8 software was can mix huge resolution images with PAL or NTSC seamlessly.

Click here to View the Quicktime (5 Megabyte file)

Submitter: Mike Seymour