Visual Effects Supervisor Andrew Orloff sits down with vfxblog to discuss the contributions Zoic has made to ABC’s scifi drama ‘V’, and gets into the details of how they were able to render so much of the environment in CG and seamlessly match it to the actual photography and video. The secret: lipstick cameras.
The way that it works is we get all the designs from production, we add the lighting details by working with the DP, and then we use Lightcraft’s realt-time 3D graphics engine, like what you would find in a video game. We convert our digital sets, which would normally take hours to render, into something that works in the graphics engine much faster. There’s a little tiny lipstick camera attached to the main camera on set which shoots up into the ceiling to read a bunch of tracking markers and give us a real-time track of the set. It will make the set move around in the exact same way as the main camera is moving. We map all the lenses to give us real-time lens distortion and depth of field. It also does a real-time composite with the greenscreen. So what we're seeing on the day is real-time feedback of what the final shot is going to look like.
