Is The Time Dead?

[Anonymous]

Hi folks,

I hope someone will help me out.

Recently I have seen some amazing effects like Dead Time effect as in Matrix. Where the characters freez in mid air and the camera turns around them.

What I need to know is:

Without the expensive dead time multiple camera setup, how to get the dead time effect. Specially when the camera turn or pan is not so drastic. Like a simple 45 degrees or so.

Can anyone shade some light on the matter?

(I have heard that just with few frames of the shot with morph and *some technique*, many commercials nowdays achieve this effect as if it is very (indeed) common technique.)

[Anonymous]

I have done a fair few of these now.. here are the options:
1. Multi-stills camera – the traditional way.. this is often very complex due to camera miss fires, alignment and set up times on set.. ( Until someone builds a rig using digitial stills cameras all networked.. and when they do let me know – this is crying out to be done.. and someone will make a fortune).. anyway you said you don’t want to do this.

2. fake it with a track or turntable. This is very common and normally involves some 3D to sell the shot. What we did was build a rig – that allowed the actor to lean against a set of wires.. this allowed him to turn and freeze – while maintaining a rigid body pose and then – when the dead time was over we snap released the cables – allowing them to come back to life. During the actor freezing – we tracked the camera from in front around in an arc to the side (90+ degrees). We also shot this moving the camera much slower than it would end up being – allowing for some compression/compounding of the final frames to remove jitter. The 3D is just in shot to sell the illusion.. in our case in this shot it was a finish line so we added suspended water and flowers being thrown from the crowd… these hnag in the air and rotated (in 3d) and then dropped once time started again. The biggest thing that worked for us was the rig.. without it the actor could not hit the same mark.. or avoid body movement.. it was attached to a body rig under his shirt.

3. the morph. It is very possible to morph between two cameras. The main problem is the line taken by the morph is usually a straight line between point A and B – but in a real temp mort ( dead time) the path would be circular. Imagine an arm out from your side.. as the camera tracks around to the side – you’d expect to see the hand describe an arc and not get shorter and then back to full length again – as the morph defines it. For this reason morphs require loads of careful planning. I just did one and it involved 2 actors jumping in the air. It worked best when they did not cross each other.. when they cross it is hard to get both foreground and background body parts to do convincing morphs.

4. One solution that I have not done – but I sawdone, was using imagemodeller to take a set of stills – at the point of the ‘deadtime’ from the first camera – a second intermediate camera and the final position camera – all 3 need to be moving cameras or cine cameras..Then at the choosen frame – the team built a 3D model of the actor – using imagemodeller – and textured mapped the photogrammerty map back on.. this then gave them a complete person to animate around – ramping and moving the camera at will while the person remained frozen. 3 camera – all moving lets you sync the same instant at all 3 locations.. ( the middle camera is just to help imagemodeller) the great thing is the actor can run in.. jump – spin and run out – all without a rig and with only 3 cameras..and unlike the morph.. the arc of each body part is correct..it really turns in 3 space rather than just looking like it does… cool trick – wish I’d thought of it !

hope that helps

mike

[Author]

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