Monday

Rig Removal

I had to use some rigs while filming for scenes where Ted was running and jumping and falling over at points where he was not making contact with the floor or where he needed extra support. The rigs were made easily using twisted wire  attached to a block of wood with some K&S at the end so as it could attach to the rig points I made in Ted during the build. 

In the shots where I knew I would be using rigs I began by taking a picture of the set without the puppet or rig in shot.



I then filmed the scene as I would normally using the rig when needed


After the whole scene was finished I took the shots with the rig into photoshop. I then placed the picture of the rig scenes over the initail empty picture of the set. Using a mixture of the eraser, clone stamp and paint tool I was able to get rid of the rig leaving the background scene and making it look like there was nothing there at all as seen below.
You can also do the same effect by masking the rig out in after effects but as I only required it for a few scenes and have a better understanding of photoshop i used it instead


Here is the frame with the rig removed


I also decided to make the sets look nicer by adding light to the train and tunnel which makes it look a lot better and stand out more as you can see in the shot below.


Here is the same process used for a different scene




One problem I did encounter was when the set changed from the initial shot which I forgot to think about at the start. For example in the scene above the gates open as Ted jumps over them so removing the rig became more difficult because I could not just use eraser tool and rig was gone as  but using the tools in photoshop and a little time it was removed successfully. Im sure there are much easier ways to do this but it was my first time removing rigs so I was just using what I felt would work and was quite happy with the results



Another thing I forgot to do first time around was to remove the shadow the rig left as well as the rig itself. It was done using the same process as the rig but made me more aware to look out for these things in future



3 comments:

  1. Looks like you've got a pretty cool project going!
    Jeff

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    Replies
    1. Thank you for the comment, I plan to have my film up here in another week or two for people to check out

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  2. awesome work, im looking into rig removal and was wondering how you remove the rig when it goes over the puppet and you don't leave a hole in the side of the puppet?

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