Blackmagic Forum

Good day. Please, how can I recreate the effect in this music video by The Chemical Brothers - Wide Open ft. Beck

-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC2dRkm8ATU

Very detailed and careful model of the actor with an animation rig. Track camera with Syntheyes or similar (Fusion's CameraTracker probably won't get it done, but you might get lucky. Match-animate the model to the actor's movements. Depending on what you want the replacement bits to look like, you might be able to build them out of the same model as was made for the actor. In this case, it was probably a procedural modeling approach using Houdini or Blender Geometry nodes. Could be done in any DCC, of course, but procedural would be the most efficient.

Loose roto of the portions of the actor to be removed and detailed roto around the interface areas. Cleanplating to remove the limbs that are to be replaced. The camera track can help with this if you model the environment and project the plate onto it.

Shoot HDRi in the environment the same day as the rest of the shoot to make lighting easier. Light and render the CG version of the actor and composite it into the cleanplate. Meticulously paint in the bits that are behind the CG. This is probably the hardest part since those bits weren't visible to the camera and thus have to be stolen from other portions of the reel or synthesized entirely. Maybe some of the recent AI applications like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion could help there. I'm not entirely sure if they could be leveraged for that kind of thing or not, but I'd rather spend a couple of days experimenting with them than a couple of weeks doing paint. Even if failure meant that I'd have to do the paint anyway. Risk/reward.

This is the kind of thing that takes a team of experienced artists several weeks.

I don't think there is a whole lot of real magic in here just a lot of hard work. I am guessing the camera would be 3D tracked around the environment using tracking software and a heap of witness cameras, which would be matched with a whole lot of clean plate shots to rebuild the environment without the dancer, a virtual tracked camera then dropped back in to the environment to produce the clean plates required. You would then track the dancers arms legs and head (using witness cameras and shooting cam) and use this data to drive a rigged model of the dancer with the wire type model which would be placed into the virtual environment to get lighting matches. You would also prob use this model to build the inside on the shorts, shirt, for casting/receiving shadows etc. The other work would just be rotoing out the arms, legs and head as required. Big job but, lots of tracking, but can't see any other obvious way to do it.

Oh right; of course. You'd use the matchmove model to get the behind-the-cg bits, not paint. Much better approach!

There's an article in FXGuide about making this video: https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/so-j ... ideo-made/

Thank you guys

Hendrik Proosa wrote:There's an article in FXGuide about making this video: https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/so-j ... ideo-made/

That was a good read, refreshing to hear that (like most vfx shots) even with plenty of planning and a skilled team stuff didn't go a 100% to plan and different techniques were required post shooting to make it all come together. So much of on set VFX work is planning contingencies to give ourselves options if things don't go as expected.