The Janitor

Compositing Final Project

Stephen Timothy Cooney
Compositing, Clemson University
December, 2009

Final Film

The making of:

The goal of the project was to succesfully combine puppet actors within CG environments. Puppets have been long used for creating fanciful and creative characters in numerous and well known films such as: Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal and the Muppets. CG has yet to really catch up and merge with muppet technology and we believe it's a potential future for puppetry. The use of CG allows directors to create environments which would be much harder to do with standard set design alone. The retention of natural(not cg) puppet characters allows much of the charm the hand made puppets create.

In retrospec we are very pleased and surprised at the results. While there were many shots that we were not able to put into the film, the results and ease with which the puppets merged into the cg environment gives great potential to this sort of combination in the future. Once the puppets and CG sets were complete, we were able to turn out multiple scenes every hour with little conflict.

The Procedure

Because we had a general understanding of the plot and characters beforehand, we were able to make the sets and puppets first. At this time we also started any FX we wanted to have that we knew we didn't need either for. Once our sets and puppets were done we were able to start picking shots that we knew we needed. We'd shoot a few shots with the puppets on the greenscreen all at once, generally this would be 4 or 5 shots around the same period in the film. Then, the match the shots we'd start rendering out sections of the ship. As renders would complete, we'd immediately start compositing the shots. This methodology allowed us to rapidly implement new shots and didn't require us to be too bound to a script if it wasn't working for us.

Example Shot Breakdown

A still from the greenscreen footage

First we shoot in front of a green-screen.

Cargo Bay CG Render

Then we make a render that fits how we want to compose the shot.

The Tree (tightened)

Lastly we bring it all together and composite it in shake. In this image, everything is tightened into groups. This is unique for this shot since so many zombies are present. We used grouping and 'template groups' to make placing many zombies much easier. This scene in particular consists of one CG background, five versions of the exact same zombie footage spaced apart in time, orientation and color, and then unique footage of a zombie falling down. Slow camera shake is added to remove any static feeling.

Background group opened up

Most of the backgrounds went through a similar process. First they were fit to 1280x720. Then they were gamma corrected as to not be too bright or dark and to match the surrounding shots. A film grain was added since these came from CG. A seperate expand was used to brighten the image if the gamma pass didn't work.

The first zombie group opened up

This group was used as the template and duplicated for the other lumbering zombies in the room. The key was difficult to get on this shot so we ended up doing two seperate chroma keys and combining them. After we get chroma keys we blur the alpha and the shrink it with a dilate node. This generally creates vastly better keys than trying to get it perfect with just chroma keying. Then the zombies went through a color pass. Some of them were changed entirely (to purple and green). After, a junk roto-mat was multiplied with the zombies alpha to remove the actor controlling the puppet. We weren't able to pull the shadow from the key so we ended up using a radial gradient to simulate diffuse shadowing. Finally, we used a move 2d to locate this zombie somewhere on the cargo floor.

Lumbering Zombie Mat

The Final Composite

Brainnnsssss.......

Concept Art & Puppets

(note that the final zombie isn't green because that would make pulling on a green-screen nearly impossible)