Year: 2017
Tasks: On-Set Supervision & VFX Realization
Software: Nuke/PfTrack
Got to do a dozen crowd shots for this commercial! The schedule was tight, so a large-scale crowd sim was not an option. Instead the crowd would consist of the extras present on set to fill the ranks for the narrower shots. I had set up three DSLRs with 70mm lenses in a side room and whenever a bunch of them were done for the day we’d shoot them. That way we would capture 80 people in 3 states of excitement from 3 different angles. It turned out to be less violent than it sounds.
To process all of this data I set up a template Nuke script to align, sync and key the three angles. Stored them in separate channels so I can dynamically select the best fit based on facing ratio later. Then I generated individual scripts from this template with Python to batch all of the crowd-plates. The rest was pretty standard – did some matchmove, roto, relighting and a bit of sensitive grading to reconstruct the fog occluding the “cg” crowd.
