Dynamo Dream Teaser Splitscreen

hey ian, i was wondering where you get all those audio assets for your videos.

Hello everyone! I`m new here and I`m here on this page exactly because of this shot! : ) I love the way keyed talent interacts with CG world. I want to learn this stuff too. Can anyone tell me how to approach contact shadow and shadows from "images as planes"? ...because I see that green-screen shadow differs from the final render shadows?

Gatis Pastars

Me too

man...now that you explain it like that, now i know how you do that. you the OG!

Ya mE 2... Easily

I also love to watch full tutorial of making this shot.

I would literally pay 50 bucks for an in-depth multi-part breakdown/screencapture/tutorial series about how this was made.

Kai Christensen

Yeah! That's basically it exactly!!! It gets me really stoked for anything where the entire set gets a chance to move around the character (conveyor belts, cars, boats, whatnot), where you get to combine the tracked camera with additional motion :D

Ian Hubert

I love this! the first thing I thought was you animated the set up and down at key points and just let the blender camera be the blender camera.

awesome

Not sure about Gokhan but I would love some Greenscreen footage with people walking around like this footage just so I could experiment with this technique. Im a bit stingy when it comes to money and dont want to buy any green screen stuff, even cloth, if i dont know how effective the technique will be. Any footage similar to this would be really helpful!

Lethal Bacon

Ah, I've been trying to make more step-by-step tutorials that cover this kind of stuff- it just takes me a long time. Did one a couple weeks ago for motion tracking. The keying and 3d set-up https://youtu.be/lY8Ol2n4o4A What type of footage would be useful? I have a lot sitting around.

Ian Hubert

your tutorials step step and have do footage ,? if any? where can i buy

WOW....

LOVE the cheeky change of environment orientation in the elevator going up at the end, lazy susan or jus deft footwork?

Jimmy Deface

Ah, yeah!! It should work in C4D no problem! Also hot damn. That's a great ISS model, man.

Ian Hubert

That's such a genius technique! can't wait to give this a try. This shot was done in Cinema 4D/Octane (I come from a motion graphics background) but have been slowly getting my head around Blender. Think your technique should work in C4D as well anyway. I modeled the ISS interior in C4D based off NASA photos. I've started work on a bigger module but slow going around work and there's so many details on that station. I'll probably be 80 by the time I finish the station! Thanks so much for the advice with the camera!

Keith Lynch

KEITH! That shot's amazing! I don't envy that roto work, haha. How'd you do the ISS interior?? It looks great! Regarding the camera move stuff, I have a bunch I want to make into a tutorial at some point, but the biggest thing is this: Export a pre-keyed video (including alpha channel. ProRes444 is what I use- but you can also do an image sequence), and import that into blender (you said you were using blender, yeah?). Set up that video plane so it fills the whole camera view, in the approximately correct position in 3d space (does that make sense?), and then parent that 3d video layer to the camera. What basically happens is the shake/camera move is nullified, so you get your character remaining stationary while the camera continues to move around it. SO! If you introduce a second camera into the scene, as long as you're anywhere close to the original angle, you can make the new camera do what you want! There's some other stuff, too (like how do you normalize someone's scale if they're moving towards/away from camera), but in this specific instance, I don't think you need to worry about that! Let me know if that doesn't make sense!

Ian Hubert

hi Ian, this is so damn cool! Could you explain a little more how you were able to have the blender camera move independently of the tracked camera please? I did this test shot a while back but would love to be able to have some more freedom camera wise for a wider shot of the actor in a module rather than being restricted to what I actually filmed - https://vimeo.com/256555152. Figure that seeing as he's not touching the floor, I could add some more rotation in as well and make it feel like he's spinning in zero gravity but struggling to get my head around how to pull it off!

Keith Lynch

Ahh, thanks so much for saying so! And yeah, I agree- the thing Kaitlin's been best at through the shooting of this episode is making things feel normal- she's really been selling it :D

Ian Hubert

So, my understanding is you've basically "inserted" the alpha mapped characters directly into the scene, just as you would plants and smoke/steam planes. This removed the need for compositing and allows the characters to go behind things, throw shadows and reflections, right? And the motion tracking provides some of the camera setup, but not all of it, correct? Yes, I too would like a brief breakdown on how motion tracking in Blender helps this. Maybe just using the original gray blocks?

Chipp Walters

Cleverly economical- you've done so much with a relatively tiny greenscreen space. Plenty of films with much larger budgets have failed to convey this sense of realism (I'm looking at you, Star Wars prequels!). Also you have to hand it to your actress for selling the shot; she believes what she's performing and therefore so do we.

Pete Burges

Oh man yes! Like, there are things our brains are INSANELY good at. If you take a still shot and add a random foreground element, even wiggling it around a single pixel's worth will tell your brain, "AH! Parallax. Movement. Balance. Depth", but once you introduce an orbit, a lot of that goes right out the window. One of my favorite examples of this is Zap's work in this: https://youtu.be/R5ApAoWA27A?t=76 It says 2007, but I think it was actually made like 2003 or something (I'm serious- it's still super fun, but it Blew Our Minds when he first put it out). But yeah, That opening orbit isn't an orbit- it's just him standing on the roof spinning in place effectively filming a panorama, then sticking a spinning CG element in the middle.

Ian Hubert

The tiny detail I love about the fake orbit is how the lighting doesn't spoil it—the light in the elevator is technically spinning around her by 90 degrees as the camera goes the other way, so her shoulder is being hit by light from nowhere, but in the full context it just works! Try as I might, I can't make my brain see it as anything but motivated light from the fixture in front of her.

Carter Burr-Kirven

Love this!

Alex Silver

Amazing!

Phillip Park

When you say "wrap" do you mean a definitive for-good goodbye to DYNAMO? IF so, what do you have in mind for the future after it?

Lukas Sprehn

This was tracked in AE, although I kind of wish I'd done it in blender just to keep it even more open sourcey (I'm honestly tempted to go back do the track in blender, just so I HAVE done the whole pipeline open source)- I want to do a little tutorial series just going through how to do a shot like this, and I'd do that one full-blender (it actually has pretty darn tracker/keyer/roto tools) But the crazy thing about the one take thing- every time you do a 3d tracking shot, you have a bunch of stuff to set up (setting up tracking, lining things up, matching lighting, all that). Meaning one shot that's twice as long is easier than two shots half as long, because the setup is usually a good chunk of the work. In this case, I shot everything really optimized for tracking (she's usually small in the frame, with lots of consistent/overlapping tracking points), so the setup was even easier than normal, and I only had to do it once. From saying "Cut" to having a blocked-in, tracked, keyed version in blender, where she was basically walking around different levels of gray cubes, was about an hour or so? Hour and a half? By comparison, I've spent DAYS just trying to get a decent track on tricky 2 second shots. But yeah, that's because it's all shot with this specific post workflow specifically in mind.

Ian Hubert

At some point I want to do a full in-depth breakdown- but honestly we'd just seen "1917" and had really enjoyed how immersive the one-shot thing had made certain parts, and I was a little bit buzzed and brainstorming and just kept insisting at my girlfriend, "no seriously but it's a fake elevator so we get to keep re-using the same greenscreen it'll be cool"- and we called over Sean and filmed it right then in the workshop. I'm delighted by how well Kaitlin was able to act natural in a full green environment, too. Honestly it was a 50/50 mix of having a loose layout in mind, and also knowing that whatever happened in the shot, we'd be able to justify it in the digital environment. If a light flashes unexpectedly, or she stumbles on something, that just gives us more ways to integrate the live action with the CG stuff. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rPv17m92sqovnbbPCzMKL4sdOplZnYxv I think that was about the extend of the planning, haha (tacoburgers were originally PLORK). But yeah, if we timed the elevator too short, I would have gotten rid of the intermediary level, or shortened them or something, or sped up the elevator, and I already knew I was going to re-edit the crab battle to match the length of her watching, so it's one of the few times we jumped in knowing we were 100% going to just fix everything in post. It's far from perfect though; like as a lot of people have pointed out, the truck definitely looks like it could have run over her on the road. We did a third take where she stopped right off the stoop and left lots of room, but I ended up liking this one better for timing/naturalism/camera movement.

Ian Hubert

the comping was done in after effect or blender ...and tracking too was done in which ....i just cant wrap my head how did you mange to pull off one camera move...

shonal bose

Would love to see/hear more about the process of making this shot. Like how much of the scene do you build before shooting? How do you plan the movement and timing of the actress?

Thanks Erich!! :D

Ian Hubert

I don't know how Ian did it, but you can do object motion blur in Eevee using a motion vector pass (in... Cycles). What I'm saying is you can render your scene in Eevee, and ALSO render it in Cycles (but like, at 1 sample or whatever) and just use that low-quality Cycles scene just for motion blur....

Jan van den Hemel

Fantastic work Ian!

Erich Stenzel

Super curious Ian! How are you getting your motion blur results? I know Eevee is restricted to camera based blur only so I was wondering what your approach to it is?

Thanks for posting this! This is the exact thing I requested as a YouTube comment, so it's wonderful to see!! :)

Mike Pouch

Thanks man! It was Sean's idea (the guy standing on the sawhorse in the background)- although it's crazy how good it works. Here's another example, where I realized having a moving camera would work even better than the two "straight and back" shots I was trying to get, so I used the little bit in the middle when the actor was changing position, haha https://youtu.be/YTxIzcET2Es?t=113 Also yes! Kaitlin crazy sold it! At some point I should record a little tour of our place here and introduce everyone.

Ian Hubert

This is super brilliant. I'm with CD - that orbit technique at the end is damn near seamless. Good work for coming up with it, and please congratulate the actress for executing it flawlessly. :D

Howie Day

Oh hey dude!!! And yeah! It was Sean's idea. As long as the rotation point is under their feet (or their feet aren't visible) you can cheat like craaaazy. I love the idea of having someone putter around for a moment as we secretly swing the camera around 90 degrees, and then just continue as if nothing happened. I think it could go a long way in eliminating that "stage play" feeling lots of greenscreen work can have.

Ian Hubert

OMG, the camera orbit technique at the end... AAAAAHHH! <3

Captain Disillusion

oof

That's what I'm talking about! Love to see this stuff. Thanks for sharing Ian.