Shake Ghost Tutorial For Halloween
Over on the Indy Mogul forums, everybody is all a twitter about Halloween, so the community is posting all sorts of interesting seasonal tutorials. In particular, WesScog posted a quick “cookbook” style tutorial about doing a ghost effect. He used a green screen in order to accomplish it, which is usually the most convenient way to have a transparent character, but not always the best way. You typically want to use a locked down camera, can’t show the subject’s feet, and can’t have a convenient natural interaction between two different characters when you use the green screen technique. So, I dusted off some footage from Jon Stevenson’s Intercourse, PA which shows a character walking freely in the environment, feet and all, which was shot using a handheld camera.
Some composites are meant to be very subtle, and require a breakdown in order to explain to anybody, such as adding rain into a shot. This one should be a bit more obvious. You can’t just ask central casting to send you a transparent glowing guy.
So, here is my first quick test:
First Ghost Walk
Secondly, here is a full “screencapture” tutorial where I recreate the effect and try to explain what I am doing as I go along. I didn’t really plan what all I was going to say, so it is a bit rough, and I apologize for that. Also, I’m used to having Shake full screen, with an extra viewer on my second monitor. I shrunk down the window so that it’d be possible to watch the tutorial for people without huge monitors, and also to make the size a little smaller. Consequently, I fumble around a little bit, looking for things that aren’t where I am used to them, etc.
And, lastly, after I finished the tutorial, I added a few more keyframes to the rotoshape, and rendered the result. It’s very similar to the first test, but a slightly different color. Figured people would also want to see the actual result of following the tutorial.
Very cool and informative.
Cool tutorial! I have never used Shake but would like to afford it someday
You make it look so easy, but I am sure it took years of practice and play.