New Zealand Maritime Museum CG Portait

This project was done through VAKA. The idea was to create a museum installation that tells the story of Pacific and Maori Voyaging, along with techniques of how vessels were created. The installation is now live in the National Maritime Museum in Auckland

 

This Blog outlines the work I did to create a painted portait looking video, to be deployed for a Musuem

 

Firstly, I wanna show how it worked. The idea is that it is a character (and in this case our actors name was Sonny), is a character within a picture frame, which then explains what is in the exhabition, however he looks like a oil painting.

This is where we started. We shoot over 2 days with the Actor, and once we had all the footage, I took all the footage and did some clean up.

I went through and removed the excess footage, along with going the garbage removal from the green screen footage. I needed to make sure that the background is clean, because of the program we would be using to apply the paint effect (which is EbSynth)

So, here is some basics on how EBSynth work, so there is more context for this image.

EbSynth uses a system of image to image linear interpalation, so what that basically means is that it looks for "land marks" to attach to, and then recreate the image from a altered image, which in this case is a "Pre-Painted Still".

Our in house artist created the still image on which is started on, however a couple of attempts in, that output wasnt looking "painted" enough, so I actually ran the inital painted frame image, through a cheap lame paint filter program, and then ran it through EBSynth. The third image in this picture shows my attempt at it, and how it achieves what we want more so that the previous attempts.

In the final compositing, I really took my time to make sure I achieved something amazing. The image below shows some of the plates that I used to create the final product.

My software of choice for compositing was DaVinci Resolve. Some of the work that I did on the clean up and compositing, includes things like:

-Smoothing the painted effect, so it isnt as sharpe using the color grading engine in resolve

-Creating Glow and overlays so the illustrations (Artist Linked below) and clouds look magical as they appare, while Sonny is speaking

-Ensuring Sonny is positioned correctly, and can blend between multiple scripts

-And much more (like spending 4 hours color grading a small area under the chin)

 

I also had to do a overview on all the scripts to ensure that they are graded consistantly

Laura Bennards Website

Overall after a tone of work, the project finally finished and was deployed. And it was a blast to work on, and also build the frame. Yes, I was also the one who built the frame, which has a intergrated ultra sonic sensor, and 2 sound bars, which are all hidden behind the frame