Doctor's Diary Previz

Just had a preproduction meeting Holger Haase and Michael Schreitel for a greenscreen parachute jump. We will reuse the panorama technique, we've used before for "Eine gute Mutter", directed by Matthias Glasner with Sonja Rom behind the camera.

Our part of the storyline will be the "new start" in the life of our hero actress. To underline her personal rebirth, she drops herself out of a plane with a parachute, not knowing how to control or steer it. It will be the season opener "Doctor's Diary". A comedy series produced by Polyphon for RTL.

The basic idea behind that VFX shot is to put her into a greenscreen studio with heavy wind machines (Michael Bouterweck will provide them). The background will be replaced with our CGI images, got from photos and rendered through our pano pipeline. So it's basically very simple. Some 3D tracking and keying challenges, but nothing special on the technical side.

The more challenging task will be shooting the correct camera movements. As we noticed before you can do the best key, the best track, but it won't work, cause your camera movement is simply not part of the shot. Have a look at the opening sequence of "License to kill" to get an idea what I'm talking about (don't get me wrong, loved that movie, nice effect work these days, but the sequence in the plane over the ground simply looks like rear projection today).



So, we got it into previz and what you see here above is my very new favourite tool, just finished programming it yesterday. What we did, was to connect a standard VJ deck (thank you so much Falk from the Prototypen Crew for that short favour) with Softimage and prepared all the data we got for the shooting. With this setup Martin could directly move his Panther Foxycrane trough the greenscreen studio in correct measurements. Interactive and in realtime! Best is, we could even switch between studio setup and CGI environment (what you actually see in the video) and capture recorded moves (no keyframing, simply realtime animations) out to Final Cut Pro. Within two hours we could see, which angles will work, which optics we will need (don't need that whole set anymore), how big the screen must be and what the rig needs to be able to do, to get our actress into the right position. In the back Holger could do a first edit of the sequence and determine exactly, what he does need more and which shots won't work at the end. So previz alone is already very cool, but doing it interactively and realtime with the DOP and the director is a true benefit (both in terms of creative work and budget). We simply loved it and are looking forward for tomorrow (when I'll collect all the data and make floor plans out of it). Shooting will be by the end of this week.