Making a WWI trench battle
Making an Army from one soldier
by Craig Herron
Animator/Director
A Fall From The Clouds
The shot needed: A Long panning shot of a WWI trench filled with German soldiers. A Sopwith Camel aircraft swoops down in the background in the middle of a battle.
The Problem: to create the shot with one actor, one costume, one rifle, and no trench, plane or battle.
The Solution: Using a MiniDV camera locked down on a tripod I shot several takes of my actor Lonny Doyle dressed in a German uniform that I created. His rifle was a parade rifle for drum and bugle corps that we modified to resemble a German Mauser. We did the live action shoot at a construction site where there was a large pile of earth and other debris with clear blue sky behind it. Lonny posed in several different places within the camera frame being careful not to be in two places at the same time. Live action filming took about 30 minutes and consisted of Lonny coming over the top, Lonny dying, Lonny going over the top the other way, and two shots of Lonny crouching.
The live action clips were loaded into After Effects and the sky was keyed out. An oversized composition was created 480x1500 pixels and five seconds in duration. The five live action clips were trimmed using the mask tool and various portions of them were aligned side by side to fill up most of the width of the composition. A still of the whole scene was brought into Photoshop where parts of the image in the trench were cloned and used to hide joints and repeating features, being careful not to cover an area that would get movement. Barbed wire was drawn in on another couple of layers, and a large photo of a cloudy sky was blown up, blurred to hide film grain, and put in a layer to be the background.
Back in AE The Photoshop layers were put over the live action clips to hide seams etc. The sky was put into the back layer and given a slight pan over time to give the clouds some motion. Barbed wire was placed in front of and in back of the actor. This pretty much completed the basic live action plate.
The World War One tank in the middle distance was a digital still taken at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. It is composited with a digital still of another pile of dirt and rubble taken at the same construction site. The tank and rubble pile have been lowered in contrast and blurred slightly in Photoshop to blend into the middle distance.
The Sopwith Camel aircraft is a 3D model built in Lightwave, textured with realistic markings and animated in Lightwave to swoop down out of the clouds and exit to the left. In AE the plane was placed in front of the clouds but behind the tank area. The billowing smoke and the rockets were also rendered in LW and composited in AE.
The entire 480x1500 pixel plate of all the above was put into a smaller 640x480 composition in AE and the plate was panned to give the illusion of a moving camera.
The final five second shot can be seen in the short movie A Fall From The Clouds.
