Post     Production

To create the old Art Deco Palisades Theatre, we shot drone footage of the Tower Theatre in Miami. The following is how we forged the virtual camera.

 

It used to be that enhancing a live action filmed scene with visual effects required either a "locked off" camera, where the film camera would be mounted on a rigid assembly to ensure that the captured image was never disturbed. Then the visual effects artists would either paint in (Matte Painting) or add animated scenery/objects. It was really difficult work, and very time consuming, not to mention very restrictive on how the camera could be utilized and/or moved.

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Today, there are amazing software solutions (SynthEyes, Nuke, Cinema 4D, After Effects) that automagically examine a scene shot with unlimited camera motion and creates a 3D scene that allows objects to be integrated seamlessly.

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For the opening of PICTURE END, we wanted to convey the theatre's classic Art Deco design and how it had degraded over the years. We filmed with a DJI Mini Pro 3 4K drone to capture the aerial footage, shooting at dusk to provide the best lighting compromise for tracker effectiveness and the scene's color-corrected look. After the footage was captured, the selected shots were imported into Cinema 4D where the program's built-in Camera Tracker was used to solve the shot's 3D world motion.

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After the camera track was solved and a 3D scene was extracted/created, we proceeded to model a whole new façade for the real Tower Theatre. We created the fictional Palisades Theatre's signature neon wrapped spire, its large title marquee, and the front-of-theatre offices above the marquee's entry. One interesting result of creating a 3D camera track is that the live action's scenery is recreated as a set of 3D points (Point Cloud) that offers a semblance of the real world's object’s shape, position, and size. We could clearly identify the Tower Theatre via its point cloud, thus allowing us to create and locate the correctly sized replacement objects to their associated object to be obscured.

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The video below demonstrates how the raw drone footage became the finished shot: a clear before-and-after comparison.