[audience applause]
Hi, welcome back to Captain Disillusion,
where truth meets fiction, and fiction meets my fist.
-What? -[audience laughing]
I’m Captain Disillusion, your guide to all things real and observable.
-[audience cheering] -And I’m Mr. Flare,
lens artifact of light, lenticular clothing expert, and actor.
Really? You tread the celluloid boards?
Since when? You have to tell us more!
Well, as you know, I’ve done some work in several J. J. Abrams pictures.
Ah, yes. Some would say too much.
Exactly.
And that’s why I decided to go back to my indie roots
and do a few short films.
That’s literally amazing.
And I understand you brought a clip.
Why don’t you set that up for us?
Well, no one literally brings a clip, it’s arranged by a publicist
-and downloaded to-- -What’s the film called?
It’s called Rush Hour.
Oh, I love that movie!
Do you understand the words that are coming out of my--
-No, no. Not that one. -[audience laughing]
This is a web video directed by filmmaker Fernando Liv-- [bleep].
Roll the goddamn clip, Charlie.
[“Mr. Sandman” by The Chordettes plays]
-[audience applause] -Wonderful! So much fun.
Yeah, my job was easy.
Just hang there and look pretty.
The stunt drivers are the real heroes.
Stunt drivers?
Yeah, didn’t you see?
All that amazing coordinated driving?
[audience laughing]
-Oh, no. No you don’t. -[audience boos]
I let you promote your film because this is a talk show today,
but I draw the line at fake claims.
-Okay… -If you want to spin a yarn,
better call a gossipy weaver, because this is my house.
-[audience cheering] -We deal in truth.
And we all know that was a fake video done with the visual effects skills
of a handsome Argentinian man.
What we don’t know is exactly how it was done.
But I’m gonna tell us.
I’m gonna tell all of us.
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
If you film something from a completely stationary angle,
it’s easy to digitally manipulate.
But it also tends to look fake to your young, media-conditioned eyes.
If the camera is moving,
manipulation becomes much more complicated,
but it ends up looking more convincing.
But what if I told you
that you could have the best of both worlds
with very little effort?
Just film your scene with a stationary camera,
manipulate it, and then add fake camera movement.
That’s what Fernando did.
He filmed moving camera shots for the beginning and the end,
and seamlessly transitioned them
into a stationary shot of the main visual effects portion
where he animated fake subtle camera movement and zooming.
Did you notice that what looks like a tiny smudge on the lens at the beginning
later looks like a stain on the pavement because it moves with the picture?
So let’s put that aside and consider this a stationary shot.
What he actually filmed was a semi-busy street
where individual vehicles and pedestrians passed by at different times.
Something like this.
After that, he picked several candidate cars and people
and meticulously traced them frame by frame
in a process old people called “rotoscoping,”
and cool, hip visual effects artists call “pulling a matte.”
He had to do this because eventually
he would make many copies of different subjects cross each other
so every edge of each had to be defined.
Now, pulling a matte doesn’t have to be a brute force tracing effort,
especially if you don’t have a whole team of inexpensive overseas artists
to handle it for you.
There are various time-saving techniques you can use.
Enhancing luminance values to define edges,
smart selection tools,
or, particularly useful in this case,
a difference matte.
A difference matte effect
learns what pixels of the stationary background look like,
then spots and isolates the different-looking pixels
of moving objects that cross it.
It doesn’t work perfectly, but it gets you a lot of the way there.
Once all the subjects were matted,
it was time for Fernando to play compositing jazz.
He combined and offset various copies of different vehicles
to pass each other centimeters apart
to a delightful old-y tune that… reminds me…
reminds me I have to do something…
Sorry, what were we talking about?
You were just telling me how awesome you think my movie is.
-[audience laughing] -Oh, yes. Wonderful stuff.
I don’t know how they did it.
I don’t think I want to know. [chuckles]
But it’s amazing.
-Thank you! -Thank you!
This has been wonderful.
It’s been wonderful!
Don’t forget to try that cleanse!
Don’t forget to never vaccinate anything
because of the quantum effects of astrological chemtrails!
Absolutely.
-[audience applause] -Well that’s all the time we--
[computer voice] Warning.
Credulium leak detected on main deck.
[dramatic orchestral sting]