Here is the first look at the making of Corporal Faith! In this section we will look at the first CGI effect created for this project. A helicopter features quite a bit in the end of the movie so many shots of this sort will be necessary. All of the rest of the shots will be created in pretty much the same way, though many of them will incorporate more camera movement and other effects mixed into the composite. This shot is fairly straight forward and will show you, in essence, how these shots will be done.

To begin with, the shot was carefully studied to figure out how the helicopter would fly through the shot. A general outline of the helicopter's movement was planned out that would keep it in the shot most of the time but still look like real, hand-held footage. Below is a still from the original footage. To make the effect realistic is was decided to have the helicopter swing behind the trees at one point. In order to do this the trees needed to be separated out onto another layer from the sky. The best way to do this is to duplicate the layer and use a keying effect to cut the sky out of the top layer, then put the helicopter in between the layers. Keying is the process of eliminating a color (in this case blue) from a layer in a composition. As you can see, the sky is a fairly solid color which will make it easy to key out.

The next step was to create and animate a 3d model of the helicopter. In order to save time the model was bought from another 3d artist and adapted for the purpose. For some reason, the textures were all messed up and had to be almost totally re-created. The model was also split onto three layers - body, main rotors and tail rotors. Each layer was animated appropriately and then the whole helicopter was animated to match the footage.   Behold, Lightwave! You can see the helicopter's path across the camera view in the top frame of the screen-shot. The helicopter was rendered in one wide shot to simplify the process of tracking the CGI plate onto the background footage in After Effects.

And here we have it, the final animation render of the helicopter. It took approximately 36 hours to render the 12 second clip. Keep in mind that the size of all of the images on this page are far smaller than the real images. The rendered animation also included an alpha channel which can be used to separate the helicopter from the blue background when it is composited.

Next, the 3d footage was brought into the After Effects project containing the separated background footage (we'll call them the sky plate and tree plate). The helicopter is inserted between the sky plate and tree plate, but it's not over there. The helicopter must match the motion of the other plates before the shot will work. Tracking is the solution and the tops of the trees will work nicely for the job. Hmm... the jpeg compression hit this image hard. Anyway, you can see the tracking window here with the point on the top of a tree. Points had to be alternated because how far the shot traveled.

After it was tracked the motion data was then applied to the helicopter plate. Below is a simple breakdown of the way in which the plates were composited. Hopefully this should make things clear.

That's pretty much it. The shot was rendered off in full, interlaced fashion. No, I'm afraid I cannot show you a Quicktime of the finished thing, you'll have to wait for the trailer. But here are a few stills to tide you over till then!   I hope you have found this making info interesting. If you have then leave us feedback! And if you haven't then leave us feedback anyway!