The making of Ed: The Movie,
(well OK, a progress report on
the first thirty-eight seconds).
The Departure:
Ed climbs aboard his spaceship having successfully escaped:
The door closing clip has had a lift-off sequence added, cuts to different
views of the ship departing and a soundtrack by way of a music loop. Download (2.7 Meg).
Stage One: The door closing layers
Take one brightly coloured volunteer, a video camera and some odd bits of software,
apply some simple layering, a lot of green and cook in a warm computer for ten hours.
View this 3 second mpeg (500K) first and
what appears below makes more sense, and here's the original
fly-through that prompted this idea.
The 75 frame Timeline
The Layers.
Top layer: The 3D Max closing door frames that cover Ed completely. All green
areas are made transparent using chroma (not green-screen), setting 'Similar' to full
and 'Smoothing' to low.
Beneath that: A still to define the left edge of the door which Ed disappears behind.
Then the strip with all the work in it. 75 frames where Ed has had the garden shed
he was clambering into removed and 'greened' by exporting as a .flm (filmstrip) file.
In Photoshop Ed was picked out with no feather or antialiasing to produce a jagged cut-out
which gets smoothed when the layers are combined.
Beneath Ed: The 3D Max closing door frames that Ed covers. His feet are the last thing to
leave the lower area while his body has begun to disappear behind the frames 2 tracks above this one.
The background: A single 3D Max still with the door filled with a temporary grey
wall and floor. This provides a good neutral background to test how Ed is going to appear.
Only glaringly obvious 'out-of-place' highlights and shadows will show up over this, and
they can be touched up with a second pass through Photoshop of the .flm file.
The finished effect. Ed scrambles into the doorway, the door moves downwards and Ed pulls
his foot in just as the door closes.
The next 3D Max scene will show the zoom out to a view of the spaceship taking off, then cut to
the flight view.
So Ed has boarded the ship, now all I have to do is fly it round a 3 minute Vista
fly-through with Rebirth and Acid Pro soundtrack. The Vista background is the '...ten hours
in a warm computer' bit.
Beneath that: A still to define the left edge of the door which Ed disappears behind.
Then the strip with all the work in it. 75 frames where Ed has had the garden shed
he was clambering into removed and 'greened' by exporting as a .flm (filmstrip) file.
The background: A single 3D Max still with the door filled with a temporary grey
wall and floor. This provides a good neutral background to test how Ed is going to appear.
Only glaringly obvious 'out-of-place' highlights and shadows will show up over this, and
they can be touched up with a second pass through Photoshop of the .flm file.
The finished effect. Ed scrambles into the doorway, the door moves downwards and Ed pulls
his foot in just as the door closes.
So Ed has boarded the ship, now all I have to do is fly it round a 3 minute Vista
fly-through with Rebirth and Acid Pro soundtrack. The Vista background is the '...ten hours
in a warm computer' bit.