Author: Louis Mesure

Final comp

I think the shot came out quite well. The lighting looks very natural.

I think this means that LED screens accessible by non high budget production studios are viable as light sources for shots, reflecting the techniques used in live set productions like the Mandalorian.

Some issues are the camera shake, where it is very difficult to create a still image with such a tight dynamic shot where every small movement is emphasised.

Colour correcting and composition.

We shot on braw to retain as much data as possible.

Using Davinci resolve I applied a LUT to bring the colour space to rec709 and ,then tweaked the colours a lot.

The lightning behind this shot worked fantastically as when the lightning flashed the stones and the ring lit up accordingly.

The problem is that out use of an LED screen has made the light too blue.

We pulled back some of the blue output

The reflections on the stones were realistic but also extremely blue due to the screen.

Rotoing out the the reflections proved useful, where the colour could be corrected to be more white.

This improved the reflections, but the sky still looked slightly artificially blue.

After sorting the colours out in Da Vinci, we bout the dpx export into Nuke

There were some reflections on the screen that needed to be roto’d out using a minus merge

We then tracked the footage.

Using the tracking data, we removed the jitter in the shot. There was a lot of jitter because the shot was so tight.

Comping scene

Using nuke I comped together the footage with the effect from Houdini.

I used a tracker to remove the jitter from the video. Colour corrected the fire to try and make it look more like it belongs in the scene,

The add mix helps the fire to blend into the scene.

Standard over merge:

Add mix node2

Rendered result:

I’m dissapointed that the rendering of the effect was so poor.

I think that with a better render of the pyro, the shot what look more effective.

I am however happy with the way that fire emits from the actors hands, and thanks to the motion capture, follows his movements well.

A follow on step from here would be to create parts of the scene in Houdini, such as the ground, to allow for reflections. As well as showing specular reflections on the actors.

Setting up the shot and shooting.

We set up the shot in the room with the TV behind the subject.

We used the lighting set up in the room to enhance it.

Arranging the jewellery and props.

Making sure exposure is correct on subject.

We shot on 35 mm for a natural look. We had quite a short depth of field to help obfuscate the screen in the background

We found that we had to play around with the refresh rate of screen and the the shutter speed to get rid of the flicker. Once we tweaked it though we were able to remove all flicker.

Once problem with the screen is it reflected a lot of light from the rest of the room, breaking the illusion. In the end we opted to just use the screen for light.