More Pyre stuff

Now that I have some footage to work with I started trying to figure out the best way to composite Pyre into the shots. I originally was going to make a form that would slide under the covers to represent his body, but any movements on the bed itself would've caused it to shift - so that, and the fact it would've been annoying as hell to create something that large and portable.

So I opted to do a CG sheet covering him., that way if I felt like it I could even move it a little bit here and that making it looks like Pyre shifting under it. The image below is my first pass at it.
It looks pretty good, a few problem spots here and there - if my computer hadn't been acting so pissy all morning I probably would've addressed already. In the original the blanket really picked up the orange/yellow glow from the lights, I need to do some major colour adjusting there. As well, the area on the right side of the bed, I need to cover over that edge of the bed and work at blending it in more around the area where Jordan is - that's pretty easy to do.

One thing I did that should help blend it a little more is I added a bit of a glow coming off the lamp, so when his hand passes in front of it the light spills over. I'll probably do more to recreate the look of digital video too with Pyre, straight CG is nice and crisp looking and lack the slight blotchy quality of video.

Shouldn't be too much work to make it all fit together.

This is the second time I've encountered minor lighting problems, when we shot at Sim's Corner the light was a little dimmer then what I would've like, but it worked so no big. But once we were done someone noticed these little tiny dimmer switches next to the main switch - making it really bright. Well, while we were shooting at the Inns of Great George, same thing. I recall moving a light around at one point thinking "it'd be nice if these were tri-lights or something"...turns out once we were done and I went to switch the light off, turns out they were tri-lights. Ah well, maybe I'll learn next time.

So I'll leave you for now with this:

While doing a shot with Derek and Graham they decided to do a couple improved and totally unusable takes. Normally they made it right to the end at least, this one take kind of ended in the middle.

And since I had the girls all dressed up we decided to do a staged photo where I'll add Pyre to the middle of. I took another little video. I'm impressed how well that little camera picks up the light when the video camera doesn't seem to be able to quite so well.

There you go. I'll post some more perhaps when I get the pictures from Moe, or whenever something else really exciting happens.