With all these type of effects, 'selling' the shot to the director and audience is usually more difficult than simply applying an effect or plugin.
Although many viewers won't know the exact details of why something looks fake, they're surprisingly good at feeling when something doesn't move or look quite right.
When things interact or get moved by nature, they do so in ways governed by laws of physics. Things such as inertia, elasticity and resonant frequencies will cause object to move in different ways under a similar force. As has already been mentioned, using a shake effect in post will cause everything to behave in the same way. The best way to get some idea of this is to look at footage of things like earthquakes. You'll see objects like buildings, flagpoles, wires and liquids moving differently from each other.
Regarding your particular aircraft shots, I would think the best approach would be a mixture of practical and post effects. It may be that you'll be able to get away with simple post-applied shake effects with fast cuts or short shots with violent action, but with longer shots some form of additional on-set movement would be good. Whilst shaking a whole front section of a set may be impractical, the swinging of things like the drop-down breathing apparatus and the odd storage locker flying open and spilling its contents would both add realism and divert attention from other, less realistic aspects of the shot. On closer shots such as a seated passenger, having crew shaking the backrest or vibrating a glass filled with wine are low tech ways of introducing realistic, differential movement. If you're having green-screened passenger windows, experiment with applying different amounts of post shake between the interior and exterior comped-in sky/clouds. With things like atmospherics (flying through the storm) try and apply things like water droplets to the exterior surface of the glass, which streak across the surface to simulate real life storms. Once you comp these in with other 'storm' effects, you should get pretty realistic results. Again, looking at real-life footage will always give a good idea what to expect, as there's always those nit-pickers that'll take great delight in telling you things like your water drops would have been frozen at 30,000 feet!
L'ers - I'm involved in a documentary now in preproduction about Pan American Airways, which includes a dramatic re-enactment of an airliner crashing in bad weather in 1928. For this scene we'll build a life-size replica of a portion of the plane (the cockpit plus the front of the passenger compartment). We're now weighing the pros & cons of physical effects versus postproduction special effects, and I'd like to pose 2 related questions to the Hive Mind:
1) Has anybody here done "camera shake" effects in post, to simulate air turbulence as seen inside an airplane during a storm? If not for an airplane in turbulence, possibly for a building in an earthquake or something similar? One alternative to this, as currently advocated by our excellent set designer, is to physically shake the entire set during shooting, but that poses challenges of its own.
2) Has anybody here done a green-screen composite of "flying through a storm" including clouds, fog, and rain seen through a windshield? If not for an airplane, for a car or other vehicle? Here too we have the alternative of physically creating rain and fog on set, but that also has complications.
Any successes, failures, encouragements or warnings would be greatly appreciated!
Wilson Chao
"Across the Pacific"
617.935.1872
Posted by: Bruno Mansi <bruno@mansi.demon.co.uk>
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