I didn’t do much work on news scenes for “The Barrier” this week. Instead, I
diverted most of my efforts to adding computer screen images to the film. In
several scenes, the characters talk about what is on their computer screen, so
I needed to add those images in.
How I Created the
Computer Screen Images
I was tempted to get some actual screen capture images from
a transportation modelling program. That might not go over too well with the
software vendors, so I decided to create my own images.
I began with a look at some screen images I found on-line. I
looked at emme/4, Visum and Cube. Way back when I used emme/2, I thought the
screen had a very distinct appearance. From what I could tell from the images I
looked at, all the screens look pretty similar now.
I used Microsoft PowerPoint to create the screens. I had a
little fun with that. I called the soft ware ‘Blackbox” by a company called
“Voodoo”. That was an inside joke. I had menu options like “Look_busy” and
“Lets_go_eat” and had icons like a piece of pie and a donut with sprinkles
(another inside joke). In the final film, all of these will be too small for
anyone to read, but I wanted to have those little details anyway.
I used several different versions of a data entry pop-up box
to create a short animation that I used in one shot. It was one of those things
that people wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) notice if it’s there, but they will notice
if it isn’t.
How I Put the
Computer Screen Image into the Movie Image
Xtranormal does allow you to overlay images and videos in
selected areas of some sets, and I did use that approach in a couple cases. Other
shots were not so easy.
In one scene, the computer screen I wanted to use was not
one that allowed an image or video to be inset. I did the overlays in Premiere
Pro instead.
For most of the shots, I was able to do a direct overlay of
a still onto the computer screen, because there was nothing blocking the view
of the screen. When the image was a direct on view, it was a simple scale and
move to get the effect I wanted. That wasn’t always possible.
When the screen was at an angle, it took a little fiddling
with keying options to get the perspective right. I found the corner pin tool
worked well there.
There were a couple of shots where a character blocked part
of the screen. I tried the color key option, but it turned out that the screen
color was too similar to other parts of the image. I found a way around that
when I realized that the computer screen image only covered a small area of the
movie image.
I started with the movie image as a video track, and then
overlaid the computer screen image on top of the movie image as I’d done
before. In the resulting image, the character’s head covered the computer screen
image. Over top of that, I put another copy of the movie image, with the color
key for the computer screen. In the final image, the computer screen image does
appear properly with the character’s head in front of it. In the rest of the
image, where the image was also transparent, the base track of the movie image
showed through.
For all of these I had a static image, but I had one shot
where the computer screen image changed. Xtranormal does allow this, but I
didn’t realize that at first. In any event, it didn’t allow the detail level of
control I wanted. Again, I used Premiere Pro to overlay the computer screen
video over the movie image, just as I’d done with the still images.
New Scenes
I worked on four new scenes this week, but only finished two
of them. One is only about 7 seconds long while the other was 1:41. The total
run time is still under 30 minutes. I hope that I will get more productive next
week.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
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