secondlife meets real life (in paris)

Hi everyone, this is my first post in sl forum,

here is short video I made for fun, it's 3 avatars dancing in some RL video footage that I recorded in Paris.

I plan on making more of this stuff, critics and comments are welcome.

here it is :
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=vKL5bSYr8PQ

Fantastic!

That's funny. I just tried to do something like that a few days
ago. I took the Beatle's Abbey Road album cover, removed the
Beatles crossing the street and tried putting my av crossing
the street, but it didn't turn out very good!

Any tips on the shadows?

- Infrared

The new release client has integrated shadows, I think that is what was used. Just beware, some get maybe 10 seconds of rez time before crashes when enabling shadows. They are hugely laggy and most systems can't even begin to handle them.

Brava! That is excellent. Can't imagine how you cut the three avatars out with no background (including their shadows) and placed them in this scene. I'll leave that kind of fun to people with skillz like yours and I'll just sit back and enjoy. Thanks!

This video was not created with a client that supports shadows. If you look closely you will see that they aren't mathematically correct, that is they don't line up perfectly.

Thus were added by the video artist which is even more impressive!

- Infrared

They do look like rendered shadows, take a look on youtube, there's a tonne of clips with the new shadow render engine. Looks pretty identical to me. As for extracting people and making fake shadows, it would be chroma-keyed in post. Literally dancing in a complete green screened enviornment, and later keyed out with a new background. Similar to any post production 3D video integration.

One way to create that would be to take two renditions of the same movie, flip them and make them greyscale or two tone, then align them in a background layer behind the dancers, but in front of the original rl footage. Flipping them however has misaligned the middle dancer in depth perspective. None the less, a very clever and technical effect.

It is a similar technique we did with the glass reflections movie http://www.wba-advertising.com/wilder/wilder_pr.html .

thanx for cool comments

it's right I recorded the 3 avatars in front of a big blue background and blue floor, that was keyed out in aftereffects, and for the shadow, I duplicate that same layer and flip it as AWM Mars said, filled it in grey, and added some transparency in it.

I'm thinking that the best solution for the shadow would be to record the scene twice, one time for the avatar, and a second time with a different camera angle " the sun point of view" in that way the persperctive on the floor would be correct.

does anyone knows where can we download that client that has shadow option ?

(edited: never mind I found it ^_^ )

I use Vegas, it has a 'deform' function that allows you to shear, pinch, punch, squeeze etc etc.. that can be used on the timeline, swapping from say left to right shear, therefore creating the appearance of the sun moving. Or you can also use that fucntion to match up the shadows if you say pan the shot around the avatars...

Given enough time and effort, you could probably almost do anything with these programmes. I'm certainly exploring different techniques all the time. I only use them in a movie, if they can be justified, not just because.

Using a single valued colour from the RGB range and making that 'All Bright' in SL, will retain that one single colour from any angle (it wont become influenced by the environment), is easier to then Chroma Key it at editing stage. If you select say a green without using All Bright, you are going to have more masks to remove the background, which everytime you remove more shades of that colour, it will have an effect on other blended colours that use that additive.

Some believe All Bright causes lag. In reality, it causes less lag as the client/sim does not have to adjust the facet shading on different sides of a prim as we move around the environment, or the time of day changes. It effectively fixes the pallette of that prim face to one value. Its other use is for Media rendering prim textured face(s). Preventing bleed and increases contrast.