The Scamp Project...

I spent most of Friday filming the rest of the original episode only to find out on Saturday all that video would be useless. There are two reasons for this. One, I didn't have enough light in the scene, and two, this video couldn't be tracked.

I use Voodoo to track all the video shots and most of the time it does a pretty good job. But after some experimentation I learned that it needs as high resolution footage as possible and you want to make sure there's at least one object in the foreground or the background that has a sharp contrast. I was filming in a room and most of the shots had a white wall and a dresser in the background. I thought I could track the dresser as it's mostly dark wood but I found since I held the camera instead of using a tripod (trying to go for a filmed look...I think that's the right word) I was able to hold it relatively still so the movements were very fine. Voodoo was not able to track this because its slip was to my knowledge smaller than the amount of shake I had in the video footage. Therefore it didn't track anything. My suggestion is, if you're going to do this, make sure you move the camera a fair amount or just put it on a tripod.


Now for light, I couldn't use a vast collection of light bulbs to light scene because I was trying to go for natural sunlight, but I simply wasn't getting enough light and apparently the place I was trying to film was conveniently being put in the dark by a large piece of furniture.


Bounce-boards were my solution. I took some white drawing paper and basically leaned it against the backs of some chairs. I lined the chairs so it bounced light coming through the window, have it make a 90 degree turn, and land on my subject. I used three chairs and I was actually able to get pretty good results. Since I was filming with a Flip camera. I found that the more light I had the sharper my image would be (mentioned this in the last post).



After re-filming everything on Sunday (actually, I reverted to another scene I was going to go with later and decided to use now) using the knowledge I gained, I was able to get some usable video footage. Sunday afternoon was spent tracking in Voodoo.


Note to anyone trying this: Set aside a good couple of hours to track your video footage and take multiple takes to make sure you have some selection in case one video refuses to be tracked.


I want a depth-of-field effect in some of my shots and luckily my subjects are small enough I could use the magnifying glass I mentioned in my tutorial and I was able to achieve this. Another thing I learned is you can use reading glasses as a way of focusing the little camera. Once again, I was also able to achieve a good DOF effect.



For the next couple of days I'll be animating and uploading sample videos online (not sure what video platform but the web show itself will be on Youtube).