Pendragon Sword of his father had over 270 effects shots in it. They were completed in about 56 days so there was certainly a lot of shots that were rushed through the process significantly. However, the majority of the shots turned out pretty decent and go fairly unnoticed. Since this kind of effects work facinates me to no end I thought I would post just a little bit of a look into one of the shots that was in the film and how it was completed. The example shot I'll use is labeled B23 in the shots sequence.
The shot right off the set, with the green screen background.
The princess is pushing through a set of doors in front of a greenscreen. It calls for a portion of the mountain city "Arfon" to be added into the background. It was a bit of a tricky shot as the green screen had to be replaced and the composited elements needed to parallax in 3D space. As you can see there is a real lack of any kind of tracking markers on the green screen itself, which would have helped make the shot a bit easier. This also made it next to impossible to use after effects CS3's 2D tracking methods to get a clean track. This is where the beauty of 3D match moving comes into play. There are a a variety of match moving packages out there. Including such packages as Boujou, PFtrack, Icarus (which is free by the way) and Syntheyes. I have chosen to use syntheyes for it's affordability and feature set. There are cheaper ones which reportedly do jsut as good a job however. I have heard PFtrack to be highly praised and it's a bit cheaper than syntheyes as I recall.
Alright, but let's get on with the shot. The first step was to create a concept for the backdrop that was to be composited. Taking care to keep the layers separate which would allow for the parallax in the shot that is needed to sell it. Nick Burns worked on the backdrop concept. Once it was completed I began separating it into layers for the composite. I believe I ended up with about 8 layers for this particular shot.
Then it was time to get to the match moving. The dolly on the shot was pretty bouncy because we hadn't had time to properly smooth it when shooting on the go. So the first step was to run it through Deshake and get some of the kinks out. After smoothing a bit. I dropped the shot into Syntheyes to get a 3D solve on the shot for compositing. All the moving logs in the foreground threw it for a few loops and it took an hour or so to really start getting a good smooth solve on it without any jitters. Once the mostly clean track was obtained the data was exported to after effects.
After a little tweaking with keylight to get a good key on a greenscreen. I've got a nice matte.
This is where the fun begins. Usually I drop a temp image into the scene to see how solid the track is before going further if it looks good, then it's time to start layering in the background in 3D space. In this instance this was all done in After Effects because it's much easier to lay in actual video such as poeple, smoke curling up from a fire etc. But in many of the cases. Layers wouldn't do the trick and the data needed to be brought into a 3D program and an actual 3D scene created for the shot to get things to move more believably and not have a "stacked photographs" feel. We begin layering in houses, mountains, smoke, walls, atmosphere to the air, light glow. Care is taken so that none of the edges of any of the layers become visible during the camera move. And that wraps it up. Shot B23 is in the can! I hope you've enjoyed this little summary of the work that goes into a single effects shot. To pick apart all 270 of the shots in the movie you can go to www.pendragonmovie.com and order yourself a copy of the film!
Click here to download. UPDATED!
The download is now about 3.2 and should look better too!
