ECG is currently working on the movie adaptation of The Fat Boy Chronicles with director Jason Winn.  As production got underway, Jason decided he wanted to create an animated shot to imitate the look of the book’s cover, seen here.

I acted at the Special Effects supervisor on-set and worked with 2nd unit DP Jack Wallace to shoot the elements that we needed to create this effect.   We were lucky enough to be able to shoot with the RED at 4k for most of the effects shots.  Here’s how it went down.

We planned on a 3 part composite for the shot.  First we framed and lit the shot, then we locked down the camera and kept it completely still for the duration of the shots.

We recorded the main talent first at 23.976 fps:

The First shot of our 3 part composite

Ideally we would have done this with a green screen, but alas one was not available that day.

Next we adjusted the frame rate of the camera and shot the students walking in the background at 4 fps, being very careful to mark off the area where our main talent would be standing.  When played back at 23.976 fps this created the perfect amount of motion blur for our purposes.

The second part of our composite

We needed only 10 seconds of footage for this shot, but because we were shooting at such a low frame rate, we ended up having the same 30 students walking back and forth through the hallway for about 6 minutes.

The last part of our composite was to shoot journal entries falling from the sky.  The director wanted it to look sort of like it was snowing pages from the main character’s journal.  The falling papers were envisioned in slow motion, and would need to be composited on top of the other images.

Again, we didn’t have a proper green screen at our disposal.  So, planning to pull a luma key in After Effects, we used blackout in the background, and shot the papers falling against that.  We shot these at 80 fps, which meant we were limited to shooting in 2k.

Slow Motion Papers falling

The trickiest part was getting the pages to gently drift through the frame without passing out of the frame to the left or right.

That was it for the production!  Next I snagged the footage and began tweaking it in post.  Step one was color treating the footage.

Removed color and adjusted exposure on background shot

Adjusted the white balance and kicked up the saturation on his shirt

Next it was time to do some rotoscoping!  This is a very time consuming process, but I got some great tips on how to best do it!  The most useful tip was to split the subject into multiple sections and deal with each one individually.  Here’s how that looked:

I started with the head

Then I split the rest of his body into sections

The bag was the hardest part to do

Here are all 5 parts put together

Next I brought my rotoscoped guy into my main composition and I used the bulge effect to make him look a little heftier.  The film IS called The Fat Boy Chonicles after all.

Just a simple overlay, nothing to smooth out the composite yet

It’s a good start, but he doesn’t quite blend very well.  his feet in particular bother me, as does the fact that he has no shadow.  So the first step was to work on the integration of his feet with the background image.

Added a shadow and masked the floor around the feet to blend the composite

Next I added an effect to blend the background color/shades with the foreground composite.  Once that was done, it was time to add the papers falling in the foreground.  I pulled a luma key from our source footage and layered many different takes together to create the feeling of constantly falling paper.  I also scaled some of the falling paper down and placed it behind the composite to give the impression of depth, and even isolated a few pieces of paper to swoosh behind him, then swing around in front of him.

Added the paper in the foreground and background

The final step in the shot was to really tweak the image to create the feeling of speed and confusion in the background.  I did this in several ways:  I added a defocus vignette around the entire screen, then I added a radial blur to the entire shot, being careful to ensure the blur got less noticeable as you get closer to the main talent.  I also spent many hours tweaking and adjusting the edges of my rotoscope to soften the composite and make it look a little more believable.

Here we have a still frame from the final animation

And there you have it!  I’m still tweaking a few of the pieces of paper, but it’s basically 95% done, just have to do the final full-res render, which will most likely take a few hours at least.  For the final version, check up on The Fat Boy Chronicles site.  In the meantime, here is my final test render to whet your pallet: