Tuesday, 2 April 2013

Panning backgrounds in perspective

I'm trying to create a motion blur for my tunnel scene right now and am having some difficulty. This is the scene where Ben and George are walking through the tunnel and Ben holds the torch, leading the way. This is more or less a tracking shot. The problem is that it is not your usual 2d background pan where you would use a solid side view for a pan. Instead the shot is actually at an angle and follows a line of perspective. Therefore, if I create a background I need to work out how I can get it to pan along with the perspective line so that it works with the camera angle. This is definitely no easy task in Photoshop and I am not sure how I would do it in After-effects. I'm not very good with after-effects and I don't really want to waste time trying. Alternatively, I might have to get a friend to do it or even my brother, who seems to be quite good with it. However, anyone that helps me with this, might need a lot of guidance and a lot of my notes.

I have given something a go so far but I'm not entirely happy with it. I've used two layers that act as a flat background. They are copies of each other and I'ved shifted one up a bit and then animated that shift using the timeline feature. I also altered the opacity of the other layer and create keyframes for that opacity. Then the timeline feature allows me to alternate between the two Layers, switching between them. This gives the sort of  illusion of motion for a background pan and the sort of desired effect that I'm looking for, but I'm not quite happy with it. It's becoming a frustrating ordeal.



My next attempt or plan involves using the perspective tool within photoshop. It's something I've only recently discovered and am now using it to create a number for my backgrounds for the film. With the tool I can create my own perspective plane for an image to be placed on that I can use it to create an image for the tracking scene in the tunnel. If I can create a background long enough and large enough, which is already in perspective I should be able to use it like a typical flat background pan and key a move from left to right whilst still keeping in the plane of perspective . Lets find out.


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