If you are into filmmaking and this here interview doesn’t inspire you, then you must REALLY hate Mexicans.
It’s an hour long conversation with Charlie Rose, one of the best interviewers ever in my opinion, and ‘The Three Amigos’: directors Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Prizoner of Azkaban, Children of Men), Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel), and Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth). They talk about their latest films (which combined got about 16 Oscar nominations last year) and their past experiences, including how they work together to make each other’s films the best they can be.
In stumbling across this video on YouTube [watchitbelow!] from master Wii hacker Johnny Lee (seriously, this dude made Minority Report and the Microsoft Surface more or less real with a laptop and a wiimote), I had an idea. See, the video was about “Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), to track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen”. Basically, he– you know what, just watch the vid:
WHAT??!??
Awesomeness, right? Well since I pretty much see everything being related to filmmaking, I got thinking: what if this concept was applied to 3D camera tracking?
When, in the post-production of a film, visual effects are added to a moving shot, someone needs to tell the computer where the physical camera is so that it can properly animate it’s camera to match the original footage when placing 3D objects.
Like this:
So if there were enough cheap cameras on set (maybe even just a couple of wiimotes) to capture a couple of LEDs strapped onto your main camera, couldn’t you just, with the right software, get your camera’s position info during shooting? I’ve always wanted a camera that could do this, but always imagined it with a sensor that recorded some sort of XYZ position in relation to a reference point. I guess that won’t be needed.
Just think if this worked in an ideal environment: Your camera would store info like focal length, shutter, colour, field of view, etc in metadata, and you would have the position of your camera in 3D space. import your footage onto your computer and go wild.
This post might not make too much sense from the tiredness and all setting in, but hopefully it’s given some people more capable than me a starting point for something spectacular.
Hi, welcome to what some websites would call a “feature”. This “feature” is really awesome and will teach you lots and lots.
Yay for features!
The first filmmaking video I so generously wish to share is a must watch. Aww, who am I kidding, they’ll ALL be must watches. Or there’d be no point in posting them. So without further ado, here is George Miller, director of the awesometastic Happy Feet and some other movie where Mel Gibson drives a car, talking about what writing and story really are.
