As of now, my posts will show you how much time you are likely to spend reading it and investigating the links. This is only an indication, but it should give you an idea of the commitment needed before you start reading.
15 minutes. Add a few hours to a few weeks if you want to try and make a movie yourself.
You might have already seen this great movie, featuring Star Wars ships in San Francisco, but it is worth another mention. I keep watching it again and again, it’s hypnotizing.
There’s an interview with the maker over at the Star Wars blog, but I hear you wondering “How was it done?”. Well, in order to place artificial objects in an existing movie, you need to track how the position of objects changes in the movie. The things you want to add need to move the same way in order to look realistic.
This is a technique usually called “motion tracking”, however, this term can mean multiple things, so the better name is “match moving“. There are many commercial packages available, of which Adobe’s After Effects is one. If you want to keep it low budget, there are also free tools available, such as Digilab’s Voodoo Camera Tracker. Those will only dump a bunch of data that you have to use in other tools, like Blender or others.
It’s a neat hobby, but beware, perfection will require a lot of your time.
By the way: if you are following the blog via the feed, now is the time to take a look at the new and improved header. I have added a bunch of links, sorted by popularity or randomness, whatever you desire.