Vanishing people trick

I think of myself as a handy sort of fellow. I fix things around the house, work on my own car, build stuff, you know.
It bugs me when I can't wrap my head around a problem and solve it.

Disappearing people.

I want to shoot a scene with disappearing people. One of the best examples I can think of is a scene in Band of Brothers. They are in a church regrouping and resting. As the camera pans the room, the guys who have been killed just melt away. The guys are not actually motionless either. The camera isn't locked down cause its moving. So is this strictly a camera trick? 2 cameras on the same dolly with the same shooting angle? ...Layered tracks? ...Mattes?
I am amazed at how cleeeaan this thing looks.
Can somebody point me to a book or tutorial for doing this???

Rick

Most likely done with a motion controlled camera. A computer controls the camera as it shoots the EXACT same thing in multiple takes. So one shot with everyone in it, then another pass with some missing, then another with a few more, then another with a few more.

I doubt there are books or tutorials on stuff like this. They might mention it in American Cinematographer, but they don't do step by steps. This is stuff people figure out, or learn when working with other people, and take with them to other jobs.

I'd suggest doing this with a locked off camera when you first attempt it.


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Although, I was thinking about something like this the other day, and if you shot multiple locked off wides in some kind of HD, then put that in a dv timeline and panned it in post, you could make it seem to do the same thing.

Of course, unless you're willing to lose a lot of resolution, you could only achieve an SD result.

Heck, you can pull that effect off without a computer at all, if you really want to.

It's not precisely the same end-result, but it is exactly the same principle: You know that one shot in The Return of the King where the white horse rears up to knock the actor back onto the burning funeral pyre? That was not a visual effects shot. It was done entirely in-camera, using a 140-year-old technique referred to as "Pepper's ghost."

But yes, these days you'd do it with a motion-control rig and very simple digital compositing. The idea of pushing in to a locked-off master wide is an interesting one, Jude. It'd be tricky 'cause of parallax issues, but it might work. If nothing else, you could use the tracking solution from a hand-held reference shot to put some life on it, to hide the fact that it's a lock-off.

This is a classic compositing shot...a motion controlled duplicate with and without the people...period. Moving a clip is nowhere near the same shot composition as moving a camera.

If you want to get fancy, you get Bijou and 3D track the camera pan and composite tracked people and transition them in / out using a cool particle effect.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Ooh - what's Pepper's Ghost? I love those things. There's a great one where you can simulate ghosts with actual smoke and mirrors.

Anyway, I was thinking about a flat camera tracking simulation for my purposes, but yeah, a push or a pan might look wonky because of the parallax error. Still that might look great in certain situations, of course coupled with a violent scrape across a violin.. heh

Quote

Ooh - what's Pepper's Ghost?

It's all done with mirrors. Literally. The Lord of the Rings guys did it by arranging a sheet of glass in front of the camera at an angle, so it reflected a fire they'd lit off-set in front of a black backdrop. Through the camera lens, the fire appeared to engulf the unlit pyre on the set. It's basically an in-camera compositing technique.

Traditionally Pepper's ghost is done without a camera, but with a live audience. You've seen the effect if you've ever been to the Haunted House at Disneyland. Or if you've ever been to a Gorillaz concert, for that matter.

I didn't watch it, but I read in passing that the exact same technique was used at the Olympic opening ceremony last night to create what the press is calling "holograms." I don't know if this is correct, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Digital compositing is great; I'm a huge proponent of digital compositing. But it's also really, really cool when you find a way to make digital compositing unnecessary.

Also Rick...when you have something specific in mind, and you have a visual reference (trailer / film scene / etc), it helps us to reverse engineer it when you post a link to what you are trying to achieve.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Pepper's Ghost was one of the coolest of old vaudeville and music hall live effects. The ghost moved to and fro out of sight in the orchestra pit, lit by limelight and reflected off the angled glass into the audience, with the image superimposed against the background scene. Actors on stage co-ordinated actions with the "ghost" in the pit.

Aside from Disney's great Haunted House execution, one modern film takeoff on this was a front-projection process known as Introvision, invented in the late 70's by John Eppolito, a bonafide Magic Castle member magician. Patent was granted in 1988. This also used an optically clear glass, but instead of angling to a second black stage, a half-silvered glass angled between the effects stage and a front-projected high resolution slide. Areas of action superimposition were masked by the luminance of the front image, with very little touchup masking required.

The process was written up in CineFX, Don Shay's great effects mag. First big feature use was on OUTLAND (1981), starring Sean Connery, and I visited the stage during effects shooting in LA. There I met one of the grandest model effects men in the business, the late John Stears, (who build James Bond's tricked out Aston Martin DB5 for GOLDFINGER!) I interviewed him and Eppolito. Both Johns loved the process, because the results could be viewed instantly through the lens, and it was all first-generation film.

A good overview right here-- and shows the stage I visited.

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I think the process is still used here and there.

- Loren

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Only because it might be relevant, I wanted to post the link to a spec commercial I worked on -- our entry for the Louisiana Hot Sauce contest. It features at lot of people exploding, their bodies completely disappearing. The effects are no great shakes (it's just the 'Big Blast' emitter from Motion), but the shooting process was fairly straightforward: shoot separate plates of the scene with and without the actor, then combine in post with one masked piece of footage on top of another. The camera doesn't move though; that's definitely a job for motion control.

LA Hot Sauce - Ty and Tabitha

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Nope...not relevant John because your bkgd plates are not moving at all and the OP specifically mentions camera panning. It's easy to do what you did there. Trying that effect on a moving shot is exponentially more difficult. Totally different attack.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.