Improved Dantooine Backgrounds, continued

Sarah finally finished Yane's peasant costume! YAY!!! Now all we need is the skirt for Yane's Royal Palace costume and we'll be ready to get Jen over here to shoot her footage! I can't wait!

On the CG side, I finished improving all of our Dantooine backgrounds. As mentioned previously, I replaced as many of our CG background buildings with high-resolution digital pictures of Matmata, Tunisia, which is the actual location where George Lucas shot the Tatooine scenes for "Star Wars."

Speaking of which, even though our script places these scenes on Dantooine (which we did deliberately so that it would tie into "Star Wars" when they mention that the Rebel Alliance had a base on Dantooine), we decided to make it look like Tatooine. Now that we're using Matmata for our backgrounds, I'm strongly considering changing our script and relocating everything that happens on Dantooine onto Tatooine instead. It just makes more sense, but I'll have to review our script to make sure this change won't cause any problems.

Anyway, here's a before-and-after comparison of Scene I510a, which shows Yane walking down Garm St. on Dantooine:

The 1st picture shows our old animatic with Katinka walking down our CG model of Garm St.
The 2nd picture shows our new-and-improved animatic with our Yane stand-in walking down our more-realistic-looking Garm St. Of course, the final shot will include background extras and perhaps more set dressing.

By the way, the 2nd picture (above) is my 2nd version of the new-and-improved shot. Here's the 1st version that I ended up discarding:

I like this one too, but the 2nd version (the one we'll probably end up using), makes Garm St. look bigger and more spacious to me. But maybe that's just me. If anyone thinks the 1st version looks better, let me know and maybe we'll use that one.

Here's a before-and-after comparison of Scene I541 when Yane leaves Bibble's Bar:

In the 1st picture, the Stormtrooper is a "size reference" stand-in for Yane, and the background is completely devoid of any detailing (buildings, moisture vaporators, etc.).

In the 2nd picture, I left out the Yane "size reference" so that you can see all the new details: background buildings, landspeeder, R5 droid, and even a couple Nuna walking around!

Of course, I always go through a couple versions before settling on the final one that I think looks best. Here's an example of a version that didn't make it:

This is exactly the same as the final version, shown above, except it's missing the R5 droid. It seems like a simple change, but the scene seems to lose its "life" without a droid. Somehow R5 gives the scene more life -- at least that's how it feels to me.

Here's the final before-and-after comparison. This one shows Scene I542 when Yane runs around the corner (on the right) and spots the Stormtroopers escorting Ryke from the Med Center:

WAAAYYYY better, right? I even re-texture-mapped the foreground wall (on the right) to match the appearance of the buildings in the background. Of course, this isn't final -- I still have to add color correction so that all of the backgrounds match, plus add live extras and other details. But at least it's a huge improvement over our previous animatic!

Later,
Bob

Improved Dantooine Backgrounds

I've been re-evaluating many of our digital sets, looking for areas of improvement. One huge breakthrough I had a few months ago was the use of matte paintings instead of 3D models in the background. Not only do they look better, but they also result in smaller file sizes and faster rendering times.

Here's the most recent improvement, Scene I510b when the Imperial Sympathizer spots Yane on Dantooine:

Much better, right? The new-and-improved version still isn't done -- I'm going to improve texture maps, lighting, color-correction, etc. But even this rough version gives you an idea how much better the new background looks.

I'll continue improving backgrounds on other digital sets, so stay tuned!

Later,
Bob

New Jedi Temple Background, New Imperial Officer, and Improved R2-D2 Footage

We shot live footage last Sat.!

We wanted to see if we could get away with only 3 shots of Brad sneaking into the Jedi Temple so that we could use the Jedi Temple Processional Way matte painting instead of a kitbashed digital model. I think it turned out well, but you can judge for yourself...

Here's the original animatic of 2 Clone Troopers standing guard outside the Jedi Temple, compared to our new animatic using the Processional Way matte painting:

WAY cooler, right?

Of course, since the new animatic is still in the proof-of-concept stage, it's rough -- the lighting is incorrect on the foreground e-web gun, ammo boxes, and barrels; there are no digital shadows; etc. If we decide to keep this shot, I'll fix everything but I didn't want to waste a bunch of time on it if we end up dumping the shot.

Here's a before-and-after comparison of Brad arriving at the Jedi Temple:

(Brad's kneeling behind the 2 barrels in the bottom-right, in case you're having problems finding him.)

Remember, since we're using a 2-dimensional matte painting as our new background, we couldn't change camera angles so that's why Brad's approaching from a new direction.

Here are before-and-after comparisons of Brad using The Force to distract the Clone Troopers:

Again, since we can't change camera angles on the 2-dimensional matte painting of the Jedi Temple, we switched to a reverse-angle of Brad behind the barrel for the new shot (using our digital model of the Jedi Temple as the background).

Here's the old shot of Brad sneaking past the Clone Troopers into the Jedi Temple:

The problem with this shot (aside from the crappy, temporary 3D model and Clone Trooper stand-ins) was that Brad could only take 2-3 steps before going off our green screen background when shooting the live footage. Fortunately, we figured out a workaround...

Here are 2 screenshots of our new-and-improved shot:

In the first picture, Brad is Force-running past the distracted Clone Troopers (who will be looking off-camera to their right).

In the second picture, Brad has reached the end of the walkway and is Force-running to the left (Brad's semi-transparent image is below the red arrow). It's easier to see when it's video, rather than still photos and it looks pretty good, even though it's still a rough proof-of-concept.

Making Brad Force-run past the Clone Troopers not only improved our story, but also overcame our problem with Brad running off the green screen.

To solve our problem, Brad just ran in-place on the green screen, then turned to face left and ran in-place some more. In post-production, I digitally shrank him as he was running away from the camera and added motion blur. It worked surprisingly well because he looks like he's actually running.

Also, Brad is semi-transparent because apparently that's what happens when Jedi Force-run. Here are 2 reference pictures from "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" showing Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn Force-running:

In this picture, I put a red circle around them because they're so tansparent that they're hard to see! To make things easier, the red thing on the left is a laser bolt from a droideka, Qui-Gon Jinn is carrying the green lightsaber, and Obi-Wan Kenobi is carrying the blue lightsaber.


In this reference picture a few frames later (after the droideka's laser bolt explodes against the blast door), you can really see how transparent Qui-Gon Jinn is since the explosion lights the scene better. You can clearly see through him, so that's why Brad's semi-transparent when he Force-runs.

Brad brought his friend Aaron over on Sat. to help us film. Don't ask me how it happened, but somehow we realized that Aaron fit into the Imperial Officer costume and looked more like an Imperial Officer than Sarah's dad (who previously shot those scenes for us). We always planned on re-shooting or replacing Sarah's dad's footage anyway, so we shot Aaron as the Imperial Officer and got some great footage.

Here are before-and-after shots of a Clone Trooper approaching the Imperial Officer:

As you can see in the first picture, I added this shot to the script AFTER we'd already shot Sarah's dad, so we never had live footage for this scene.

In the second picture, you can see Aaron as the Imperial Officer. You can also see that we decided to relocate this scene to the "Venator" Imperial Star Destroyer bridge, rather than our previous "Jedi Temple Security Station" (which we invented).

Even though I always planned on improving the Jedi Temple Security Station digital set, I think the scene looks much better on the Star Destroyer bridge. Now I have to re-texture map the Star Destroyer bridge so that it looks more realistic...

Here are before-and-after shots of the Imperial Officer giving orders to the Clone Trooper:

I haven't decided if we're going to stick with the closer shot or not. If not, I can always change this to a longer shot by digitally-shrinking Aaron. Gotta love digital manipulations!

Also, this shot will look REALLY cool after I re-texture map the Star Destroyer bridge model!

Here are before-and-after comparisons of another scene, when the Imperial Officer appears as a hologram on the "Imperator" Star Destroyer bridge:

No offense to Sarah's dad, because he really worked hard on his footage, but we think Aaron looks more like an Imperial Officer and we were able to get a better performance out of him. Of course, shooting during the day also helped tremendously (we shot Sarah's dad at night when we were all tired). Now we have to find another role for Sarah's dad to play so that he can still be in our super-cool movie! :D

Here's a close-up:


And here's the "choking to death" scene:

I actually liked Sarah's dad's performance better in this scene. He really got into it and gave us some great footage. Aaron's footage was also good, just not quite as dramatic.

Funny side note: Aaron doesn't like to make choking noises, so we ended up having Brad make the choking noises off-camera as Aaron shot his scenes. You can't even tell in the final footage. Too funny.

Finally, we were able to shoot live footage for our R7-D5 shots! Since Nicole and I own a Nikko R2-D2, we shot it against the green screen just like a live actor!

Even if I improved the texture maps on the R2-D2 digital model, it would never look as realistic as live footage of an actual R2-D2. Sweet!

There's so much work to do that I have no idea what I'll work on next week so you'll just have to wait and see!

Later,
Bob