Freekstorm VFX Blog

Resources: SynthEyes, Softimage, After Effects, camera, sticky dots + willing victim.

This was an experiment to practice object tracking to see if I could effectively match move Mervyn the Monster’s head onto a real human head (many thanks to Michael, who bravely volunteered for this task.)

First I put tracking markers on Michael’s head. These were simple sticky red paper dots that you can buy from any stationery store. The dots were specifically positioned on his head so that they wouldn’t move relative to each other. Then I filmed him moving his head around.

The next step was to transfer footage to SynthEyes and perform an object-based match move on the markers. This results in all of the markers being treated as part of the solid object and the output from SynthEyes is the movement in that object. I then took the results of the match move and loaded it into Softimage. This gives you a virtual camera that sees the object move in 3D in the same way as it does on film. You then load in the object that you want to composite onto your footage, which in our case was the large chunk of Mervyn’s head. I created a mask that hid the part of Mervyn’s head that I didn’t want to be visible and then rendered out the sequence. Finally I composited it into Adobe After Effects which produced the final output.

Voilà! Boy and Monster are as one!






The total time taken for this was around six hours. Please note that I didn’t make any effort to ensure the cut-out of Mervyn’s head fit cleanly, so the match move isn’t perfect. This was a proof of concept – and it worked! Next time I will do better!

Labels: test, visual effects