Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6179
January 2010 33 We support your creativity. DOSCHDESIGN.COM 0 5 2 5 7 5 9 5 1 0 0 A d v e r t i s e m e n t - C G W - D e c against the black backdrop that was used in the hologram. e lighting also had to match the lighting in the original footage. However, Godfrey notes, that lighting was not condu- cive to what was required in the hologram rig—an issue that the director of photography eventually resolved. "At this point, we had only eight days left before the party, and still had to do viewings with the clients," says Godfrey. Head of animation Olly Tyler and com- positor Gabriel Sitjas worked nonstop over the weekend to rotoscope 24,000 frames of Sinatra from the original footage. Not only did they have to separate out his head, but the roto—which was done using Apple's Shake— also included his eyes, neck, mouth, hat, and hat brim within the cut. "We cut out the stage set from the house [where the original foot- age was filmed], so we just had Frank standing there," describes Godfrey. Within the original footage, Sinatra moves around somewhat, mainly in a front-to-back pattern. is action resulted in the size of his head becoming larger and smaller in camera. Lead compositor Jonson Jewell had to coun- teract this movement, or size differential, so that the singer's head remained at the same size and in the same position by stabilizing it and keeping it locked on that one plane. "With the holographic projection system, when a person walks back and forth, they get stretched in an odd way, and you end up with an element of distortion at the show that we wouldn't have had any control over," says Godfrey. "We just didn't want to risk that, so we kept him relatively still." Jewell then worked around the clock main- ly in Nuke (e Foundry) and a bit in Shake to convincingly attach the cutout head footage to the newly filmed but headless body double. is task was especially tedious: e slightest mismatch of the head and body would show up badly around the neck area. So Jewell tracked the body double's neck area and ap- plied that to the head using Shake and Nuke, making minor readjustments every half sec- ond throughout the song. Animated shapes were used to patch up areas around the neck and collar, some of them used to create artificial shadows and lighting, which in turn gave the head the correct-looking volume and depth. At one point in the sequence, where the body movement and the head just would not match up, the team created a short morph sequence using a different section of Sinatra's head footage, which fit the body better. Once the head was locked onto the body, the team used Shake to colorize Sinatra's face (the archive footage was black and white). ey also utilized the Furnace tools that ship with Nuke to de-grain the footage and restore film damage inherent in the footage. e finished image was then added to a black background. Although Godfrey thought that keeping Sinatra in black and white during his holo- gram appearance helped situate him more in the era from which he came, the client opted for "living" color. "ey wanted him to look as real as possible, as if he just came back from the dead," she explains. During Sinatra's recent stage appearance, his image starts out in a picture frame with the original footage, and then the footage "steps" out of the six-meter frame, all the background disappears, and the holographic image, which is in color, performs the song. Two projectors provided the necessary brightness on stage. For the playout system, a Musion Eyelin- er 3D holographic projection system, which required an HD static full-body camera shot of Sinatra on a solid black background, was employed. e system uses a technol- ogy similar to Pepper's ghost, an illusionary technique that makes a 2D image appear solid, in 3D, though to do so, the object, or in this case, the character, has to have some slight movement. Blast from the Past While SquareZero and countless other facili- ties have composited heads onto body doubles in the past for commercials and other projects, Godfrey says there is a big leap from doing those sorts of projects to one like this. "You have more flexibility and can hide things be- hind an edit. Here, we couldn't do that," she says. "e hologram was life-size and ap- peared right in front of the audience's eyes, so we couldn't do the typical cheats that are done for TV and film. And, the shot had to be one take, continuous." SquareZero had been asked to bring other entertainers back to life, including Miles Da- vis and Freddie Mercury, but the necessary ele- ment, Godfrey says, is in locating footage of an entire song captured with a single camera. "What gets archived is just the edit from the multiple cameras, not the footage from each camera," she explains. "We were lucky to have found [the Sinatra] footage." Perhaps soon we will see more celebrities who are no longer alive performing digitally. For Sinatra, though, this was a very special one-time appearance. n Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Graphics World.