Here is entry three in the Making of Corporal Faith. I think this is probably the most interesting yet! We are going to discuss the making of "Down Range"!

Ok, for those of you who haven't seen the movie (which should be all of you), "Down Range" is the red-light area outside of the base in Vietnam where Hendrix and Faith are stationed. There is a shot in the movie which shows Hendrix stumbling out of a bar and heading back to the base. The shot was recorded without any bars. In fact, it was recorded without any buildings. The bar that Hendrix stumbles out of is just a space between two big freezers next to a parking lot. Here is a still from the original footage. I have increased the brightness on all of the pictures on this page to make it easier to see detail. As you can see, it doesn't even look like a street. In order to fix this shot, bars had to be added on the opposite side to make the parking lot into a street. So that's what I set about doing.

It was decided that a 3d row of buildings would be the best way to accomplish the task because very controlled perspective and lighting would be needed to make it fit into the scene. Buildings were built along the right side of the street, an artificial street was added in to go off into the distance behind Hendrix and another building was built to fill out the area on the right.    Here it is! Notice that there are not many polygons in the scene, but there are seven lights which is quite a few for such a small area. Lighting is crucial in mimicking reality, especially in a scene like this. Notice the flat plane in the place of the real building. That was placed to help with scene composition and lighting, it was not rendered into the final scene. This 3d scene is animated. Some of the lights were made to move to help add reality to the scene.

Here is a still of the rendered 3d plate. Not so real looking is it? Too clean, right? Well, it still has a ways to go. On to the next stage - compositing!

In order to composite the elements of the scene, the live plate (the original footage) must first have the unwanted area cut out of it so that the 3d plate can be stuck into it. Here is a screenshot of the live plate with mattes drawn in. The spline matte around Hendrix had to be animated, of course. It took over a hundred keyframes to cut him out of the 20 second shot.

Next, the 3d plate was stuck under the live plate. There were holes left over from the empty areas of the 3d plate (such as the sky), so another copy of the live plate was put in the background to fill in. Next, noise had to be added to blend the 3d plate with the live plate. Here is a still of the noise that was added. It obviously was toned down a lot before it was composited into the scene. After the noise was added, a few more tweaks were made to complete the blend. At one point Hendrix comes close enough to the wall to cast a shadow onto it. I added a black layer and animated a spline to mimic his shadow hitting the wall.

Here is a still from the final animation! Notice Hendrix's shadow on the wall.   That's all she wrote! I hope you enjoyed it! Be sure to watch the Trailer and leave Feedback!