Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Nice!

A few pointers
TB — (archived)

--Think hard about lighting. It's going to be very difficult to matte an object in that you get from somewhere else and have the lighting match. A very generic background situation (bright sky, sun overhead someplace) is more forgiving than a light source that's actually in the shot itself.

--A locked off shot like that is unlikely to pick up a UFO in real life. Next time have the scenery shot, then quickly pan over to where the UFO is and try to follow it (badly). This is what a real person with a camera would do. Unfortunately, it's a screaming bitch to matte something into a moving background and match the motion. Prior to the advent of complex camera motion control in films ("Star Wars"), special effects people avoided it like the plague. Now with computers, filmmakers can do this easily. Look at "Cloverfield."

One trick that might work is to do a locked-off UFO insertion like you did in this film. Then, if you have a way to do it, "zoom in" on a small section of the scene, then move that smaller frame up to where the UFO is as the cameraman "discovers" the UFO. You can move the "frame" as much as you like to simulate a shaky camera, and since the UFO and scene are already matched, it will work. Imagine putting your YouTube on a big screen and then moving in close with another camera to take the "wiggly" shots. Can that be done in software?

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