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"Disappearing effect" in Music Clip
  • DubiduDubidu

    Hello Everyone I recently saw Two Door Cinema Club's newest Music clip. It's called "sun" here's the link.

    In this clip they're using a very confusing disappearing effect. Turns out I shoot a music clip my own in two weeks and I could use this effect too. Has anyone an Idea how they do it? I thought maybe they used green screen towels. But they're also using the effect in moving shots, so they actually had to film two times exactly the same camera movement to make it work, right ? Thanks for your answers :)

  • 5 Replies sorted by
  • BurnetRhoadesBurnetRhoades

    Green screen. If they have a good enough clean plate the movement can be handled with manual paint-fix methodology. Optical flow and more sophisticated techniques can make doing these sorts of things practically hands-off.

    There was a package called Mokey that a buddy of mine accidentally removed a functioning helicopter from, just messing around, testing out its ability to remove wires and support structures from moving plates without even the need for a clean pass, just enough footage in the single plate without the offending object(s) to use as reference.

    I think some of its tech is in the full-on version of Mocha now, or something like it.

  • QuickHitRecordQuickHitRecord

    Actually, it looks less like green screen to me and more like a clever use of plates. I quite like the effect.

  • DubiduDubidu

    Just found this: http://www.promonews.tv/2012/10/22/two-door-cinema-club-sun-by-julmat/

    But I'm still not completly getting how they did it :). Haven't got much experience with greenscreen.

  • BurnetRhoadesBurnetRhoades

    @QuickHitRecord the first shot is clearly done with a green screen poster board and then in the big group numbers they're clearly coming out from behind some kind of green screen drapery, some kind of cloth, that was hiding them, allowing their mass to be filled in with a clean pass(es).

    It's essentially the same technique for how the weather man does what he does every night. What makes it so effective is the scale they did it at. There are so many people dropping their cloaks-of-invisibility most viewers won't be centering in on any one particular group of people, they all just see them magically appear but not by dissolve or other purely mechanical means with no technique behind them.

    Steven Tyler being unzipped and the little demon guy popping out, in the old Aerosmith "Living On the Edge" video made good use of it too, but that wasn't in the daylight and on this sort of visual scale.

  • BurnetRhoadesBurnetRhoades

    That last shot, the widest, they're just doing simple roto-mask shapes with crescents along their bottom edge to sorta look like the earlier shots which had actual drapery. It's possible they just had some solid color for the covering and the operator roto-masked this shape rather than key but the article does say there was a mix of techniques based on the angle.

    You can get this flexible Scotchlite-like material that lets you do folds in a green screen with abnormal shapes where normally this would be a no-no because of shadows. It requires a special ring-light around the lens to create the on-axis reflection, filling in any shadows caused by folds or self-shadowing. I doubt such a little light would work that far away, in the last shot.

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