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How Did They Shoot This?

Kaylee

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Once again, I have a question for the JREF film and video wizards.

How did they shoot this videotape?

http://www.deaftv.com/film/Catty-Cake/

Viral Signs takes a video that has gone viral on youtube. com and interprets it in American Sign Language (ASL).

Here's the original youtube video.

ETA: ORIGINAL YOUTUBE VIDEO DELETED

At the deaftv link, they took the original "catty cakes" video and added in the same interpreter twice and he is interpreting for both cats simultaneously.


(Yeah, its a stupid video :), but it a relatively easy way to pick up a few ASL signs which is one of my projects at the moment.)


A few weeks ago we had talked about how Buster Keaton filmed "The Playhouse" where in some scenes he appears simultaneously as many as 10 times.

TheDoLittle and gumboot provided the answer, which IMHO was really cool.

The Viral Sign videos aren't as good, obviously, but I'm still curious as to how they did it. I'm guessing in this case they used some "photoshop" type techniques to somehow mash 3 separate videos together instead of the mechanical technique that Keaton used as explained by TheDoLittle and gumboot.

Is that possible?


More stupid videos :)

Annoying Orange

Original
DELETED

with ASL
http://www.deaftv.com/film/annoying-orange-viral-signs/


Bluuhhhd

Original
DELETED

with ASL
http://www.deaftv.com/film/blood-viral-signs/


ETA: If you watch for it, you can see how they have the interpreter fade out -- sometimes after the youtube is finished and sometimes before. I wonder how they did that also.
 
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Yeah, that's not photoshopped or altered at all. It's a video of cats playing with each other like cats sometimes do, with an amusing voice-over that makes it seem like they're playing a children's game called "patty cake" and bickering about it.
 
Watch the videos at the deaftv links. I deleted the original youtube videos.


ETA: I didn't write my original OP clearly -- I can see why my question was not clear originally. Sorry about that!

I rewrote the OP.
 
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I think the question is how did they get the cat video and the video of the same guy on the left and right into one image.

The guy was shot twice, once doing the actions on the left and once on the right, against a green screen or similar. In a process called chroma keyWP compositing, that background is then removed, and you can add any background you want (like the cat video), as well as putting the images together as they did.

It used to be done with film and mattes and apparatus called optical printers, but now computers make it easy.
 
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AdMan said:
I think the question is how did they get the cat video and the video of the same guy on the left and right into one image.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's my question! :)

The guy was shot twice, once doing the actions on the left and once on the right, against a green screen or similar. In a process called chroma keyWP compositing, that background is then removed, and you can add any background you want (like the cat video), as well as putting the images together as they did.

It used to be done with film and mattes and apparatus called optical printers, but now computers make it easy.
Click to expand...

That is very cool.

Can they do everything at once? Or did they have to put the new background (cat video) in with one the video of the interpreter on the right for example, and then use that merged video for the background in the video of the interpreter on the left, for example?
 
Kaylee said:
Yes, that's my question! :)



That is very cool.

Can they do everything at once? Or did they have to put the new background (cat video) in with one the video of the interpreter on the right for example, and then use that merged video for the background in the video of the interpreter on the left, for example?
Click to expand...


You basically have three elements in this case--the cat video as background and the guy shot on the left and right with the background removed in each case. It's just a matter of layering them together in the computer and rendering the final video, so basically one step once the elements are ready.

It used to be a lot harder with actual film and no computers, as the earlier Buster Keaton examples indicate. He basically had to do everything in the camera.
 
AdMan said:
You basically have three elements in this case--the cat video as background and the guy shot on the left and right with the background removed in each case. It's just a matter of layering them together in the computer and rendering the final video, so basically one step once the elements are ready.
Click to expand...

Very cool. :) That must be fun to play with.


It used to be a lot harder with actual film and no computers, as the earlier Buster Keaton examples indicate. He basically had to do everything in the camera.
Click to expand...

And the amusing thing is that the timing in The Playhouse, even the scenes with 10 Buster Keatons is superior to the timing in the "Catty Cakes" video. Even though Keaton had the much harder job to do.
 
Kaylee said:
And the amusing thing is that the timing in The Playhouse, even the scenes with 10 Buster Keatons is superior to the timing in the "Catty Cakes" video. Even though Keaton had the much harder job to do.
Click to expand...


Yes, that scene must have been incredibly difficult to achieve that well.

Here's another article on compositing that goes over some of the history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing
 
Kaylee said:
Yes, that's my question! :)



That is very cool.

Can they do everything at once? Or did they have to put the new background (cat video) in with one the video of the interpreter on the right for example, and then use that merged video for the background in the video of the interpreter on the left, for example?
Click to expand...
It has been extremely easy to do that for amateurs for at least 12 years - ever since they introduced chromakey effects that could be done on normal PC and that's been, well, about 12 years. I was doing them with a stand alone called Screenplay by '90 or 91.
 
fuelair said:
It has been extremely easy to do that for amateurs for at least 12 years - ever since they introduced chromakey effects that could be done on normal PC and that's been, well, about 12 years. I was doing them with a stand alone called Screenplay by '90 or 91.
Click to expand...

I took a quick look on the web and I see there's a lot of software available with the chromakey handling feature.

I'm surprised that a piece of software called Screenplay is one of them, as it seems to be outside of what a piece of software designed for screenplays would do -- but incredulity is never a good response.

Anyway, thanks to you all for putting the E into JREF. I'm never dissapointed when I post a question here! :)
 
Kaylee said:
I took a quick look on the web and I see there's a lot of software available with the chromakey handling feature.

I'm surprised that a piece of software called Screenplay is one of them, as it seems to be outside of what a piece of software designed for screenplays would do -- but incredulity is never a good response.

Anyway, thanks to you all for putting the E into JREF. I'm never dissapointed when I post a question here! :)
Click to expand...
.
Paintshop Pro X3 came with a green sheet for chroma key work.
It works well, and is easy.
The computer added visuals in "Jurassic Park" or any fancy movie with fictional actors are done that way.
 
I Ratant said:
.
Paintshop Pro X3 came with a green sheet for chroma key work.
It works well, and is easy.
The computer added visuals in "Jurassic Park" or any fancy movie with fictional actors are done that way.
Click to expand...

That is cool about Paintshop Pro X3. I only have the free version, but you can use edit colors to select the exact shade you want.

I think if you select Red 0, Green 255 and Blue 0 that would give you chroma green. Or at least some guy on the internet at Yahoo Answers said so. ;) :)
 
I Ratant said:
.Paintshop Pro X3 came with a green sheet for chroma key work. It works well, and is easy.
Click to expand...


That would certainly make it quicker, but you can do it fairly easily without it. In Photoshop all you have to do is draw a path around the object you want to keep, turn it into a selection, and then you can invert the selection and delete the background. Or select the object and paste it over a new background in another image.

I can remember doing some of that back when I used to work at a service bureau working on retail flyers. The images often came in shot against a backdrop of one kind or another, but the retailer just wanted the product in the flyer, no backdrop. So we had to remove that background. Easy work, though dull.
 
Another question for the JREF wizards :) -- was chroma key compositing used to shoot this video also?



Obviously no one can draw and write that quickly. They probably also speeded up the film (while keeping the audio track at a normal speed), but no one can draw and write that well on a first draft either. And its obvious that for some of the text, the hand is just sort of in the same area but was not the same hand that drew the text. That is probably true for some of the drawings also.

So ... I'm guessing a combination of speeded up video and chroma key compositing, unless there are other video techniques that could have been used to do this?

ETA: I'm guessing they made a copy of the text and drawings that were actually used in the video, and had the guy "with the hand" pretend to write and draw it for the video. Then later using chroma key compositing they placed the original text and drawings back in the background. Later they also matched up the video and the sound track. Am on I track? Bad pun intended, ;) but please answer anyway. :)
 
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Kaylee said:
Another question for the JREF wizards :) -- was chroma key compositing used to shoot this video also?

Obviously no one can draw and write that quickly. They probably also speeded up the film (while keeping the audio track at a normal speed), but no one can draw and write that well on a first draft either.
Click to expand...

Probably just shot time-lapse. He could have rehearsed the entire thing earlier.

There's a freeware program called Blender that allows you to do compositing and chromakeying. Here are a couple of videos I did with the new camera tracker update (known as the Tomato branch). The first was shot on my back porch. The second was done using stock video.






Here's the link to the Blender website. Click on the Blender 2011 Showreel to be impressed.
http://www.blender.org/

Steve S
 
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Very cool Steve, thanks.

I took a look at some of your other videos on youtube also. Looks like you were having fun with this. :)

And I'm sure it looks a lot easier to do that it is. For example on the 2011 Showreel, they filmed an orange being smashed between two glass blocks and then turning into a jar of orange juice -- I'm sure that took a lot of time and patience.
 
This is actually really fun to play around with. If you want to try it yourself, at least with still images, take a camera and rest it on something (a tripod, table, anything) so it sits completely still and all you have to do is press the trigger. This ensures the background will be identical in every photo you take, making for very easy editing.

Now take two photos, with the subject (a cat, book, yourself, anything) in different locations. Make sure the subjects are a distance from each other and don't "overlap".

Now upload the photos to your computer and open each image in MS Paint or a similar simple editing program, and simply draw a box around the subject and copy it. Open another image, paste it in. You may want to use the zoom function to make sure it perfecty matches the background.

Hours of fun:).
 
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