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MillimeterRecreating a Classic
Dec 17, 2009 12:00 PM
How Smoke & Mirrors New York brought The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover to life.
In this shot of George Harrison, his hair and beard were grafted on and his actual guitar was replaced with a CG Rock Band guitar.
How they did it
Among the elements keyed into the bluescreen background were 3D CG buildings, which were created using Softimage. Photographed images of the actual buildings on Abbey Road were then projected onto the 3D buildings using Flame. The illusion was finished in Flame by adding matte paintings, moving CG cars and trees. The archival film required much digital restoration, and all elements and composites had to be color-graded and lit to match the look and feel of the cover photo.
"Flare was indispensable on set because there was no other practical or effective way of ensuring that the body doubles' movements would line up precisely with the archival shots we planned to use," Isaacson says.
On the set, the output of the 35mm camera's video tap was fed into Apple Final Cut Pro on a MacBook, and then exported as uncompressed QuickTime files into the laptop with Flare software.
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"The deciding factor for us in buying the Flare systems was the sheer volume of work we're doing these days," says Mark Wildig, chief technical officer of Smoke & Mirrors London. "We often have more than one person on a job, and that used to mean our heavyweight machines were always tied up. With Flare, we can free up our Flame systems to take on other work."
"Flame was extremely beneficial to this project because it contains all the tools we need to create and composite visual-effects-intensive spots and finesse and finish them in one box," says Simon Hester, head engineer at SMNY.
The results
"Bringing The Beatles' Abbey Road album cover to life was one of the trickiest, most challenging things I've ever done to be honest," SMNY says. "It would have been impossible to do these visual effects without Flare. This wasn't something you could do with just a mix and overlay, or simple composites on a Mac. It wasn't something you could ask the video assist to deal with since they have their own jobs to do. And we ultimately had to make the decisions about the takes because we'd be the ones doing the effects work."
"Flare impressed everyone that witnessed how it brought Flame capabilities to the set," Hester says. "Back in the studio, it works seamlessly with our Flames and the other Autodesk systems in our powerful, efficient pipeline. There was no way we could have achieved what we needed to on this project without Flare."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.