your best guest on how they did THAT

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A Day late & a Dollar-short Productions

Motion Control with green and blue skates.

Rui Barros
Editor Colorist Trainer
Lisbon, Portugal
RTP Post-Production
Apple Certified Trainer FCP 7
Apple Certified Pro FCP 7

Rui is correct. It's from a skate DVD called Yeah Right by Spike Jonze. the Girl and Chocolate skateboard team feature heavily in it. There are tons of cool effects used in skate videos for the first time on that disk. Super slo-mo, green screened ramps, very cool. Supposedly it's one of the highest selling independently produced and distributed DVDs ever but I don't know where I heard that. I saw it when a nephew went through the skateboard phase and I spent some time in stores and parks. Needless to say he got it as a gift AFTER it had been watched a few times at our house.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

Do you think they did a lot of that in Shake or After Effects?

Sure, Shake or AE or Smoke, Flame Inferno, Henry or any number of compositing applications that do greenscreen and motion tracking.
If your question was Could they do that in Shake or AE? then the answer is yes, with the right plug-ins.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

You could do some of it in FCP. Not sure how much motion tracking you'd need if the boards and wheels were the right colors.

I would think that you would almost have to do this with those plug-ins (ie Shake) to rid the skateboard's shadow and replace it with just the skater's shadow. Just for fun, it would be nice to see a video tutorial on this.

wow, they not only removed the green screened skateboards, but they also painted in the shadows of the skaters' feet over the ground -- not in all the shots though, but it was still cool ...

a lot of work; I hope they at least made some money for all that :-)

that's what I though / just could'nt figure a Motion control budget for that kind of video...

but if it's a real prod of that kind, I can relate

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A Day late & a Dollar-short Productions

I'm pretty positive there was no motion control in that video.

So how did they get the "background" behind where the actual skateboards were?
Just wondering..

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

Rotopaint?

Andreas

An educated guess is that they simply removed the skateboard and painted in the background using a tool similar to the clone tool in photoshop.

In theory you do not have to use red or blue skateboards for this since you still have to go in and paint the backgrounds back. Red or blue boaards would make it slightly easier tho.
It would be quite difficult in AE but possible.
My guess is that they used Shake or some other node based application.

Johan Polhem
Motion Graphics
www.johanpolhem.com

I know from having seen it that it was green painted boards. That much is sure. There is a sequence where someone breaks one and smashes it on the ground and another in the photo section of the DVD of broken green boards. They do a whole other thing with green painted ramps so that it looks like boarders take off improbably into the air. The opening trick uses that method with someone jumping two lanes of traffic off an invisible ramp and an observer vocally contributing the title with a anglo-saxon expletive between the "yeah" and the "right"

I've just always assumed it was done with motion control cameras but I guess it could have been done the hard way.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

It wuld definately be easier with motion control since you could just remove the green skateboards and replace it with the clean plate.

It does not look like it was however, considering the movements of the camera are very "loose" and uncontrolled. Cant be sure though...

Johan Polhem
Motion Graphics
www.johanpolhem.com

no to mention that motion control is more of a studio gear

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A Day late & a Dollar-short Productions

There is a motion tracking with clone tool in After Effects. It could, and likely was done with AE,... unless they had a pretty big budget for a FLAME! I have seen similar work done on old Flames, which can be found for pretty cheap,... but I suspect it was done with AE.

WOOMZA.

I doubt it was done in AE, considering how poor the tracking tool is.
It would not be worth it.
Shake is much more likely used for this type of work.
(I would definately use shake and I am much better at AE)
Shake is very cheap now as well.

Johan Polhem
Motion Graphics
www.johanpolhem.com