This article describes the conception and creation of Shot #114-A, one of about 300 shots in the upcoming sci-fi farce film short Astronuts.

During the second act, our fearless space heroes tumble around in the bridge of the starship Millisecond Canary, which has just been flicked across space by a giant blue hand. Here's the script excerpt:

46   INT. BRIDGE                                               46

     The room SHAKES, and people are struggling to stay in
     their chairs.  Monty continues to read his comic book,
     seemingly unphased by the activity around him.  After a
     beat, he slowly looks up from his comic book and looks
     around the bridge.

     After a beat, Monty shrugs and then turns back to his
     comic book.

As originally conceived, the sequence consisted of ten quick shots, numbered 114 through 123. As with most shots in Astronuts, this sequence of shots would be realized by compositing footage of actors shot against a bluescreen with still frame renders of a 3D model of the Millisecond Canary's bridge.

Four of the ten shots (115 / 120 and 116 / 121) prominently featured two characters, and I thought it likely that the actors would be filmed separately. To gain a better understanding of the footage that he would need to shoot of each actor, I constructed CGI storyboards of these four shots. This was done by positioning 3D human models from an old version of Poser -- each human model scaled to the height of one of the actors -- in the as-yet-unfinished 3D model of the Millisecond Canary's bridge. I then rendered still frames approximating the hand-drawn storyboards.

The hand-drawn storyboards and their CGI counterparts are shown below.

Description	Storyboard (Hand-Drawn)	Storyboard (CGI)
Shot 114. Close-up of Millisecond Canary's bridge viewscreen as the camera shakes. On the screen the stars streak side-to-side, because the ship is yawing at high speed as it hurtles through space. Hand-drawn storyboard made March 17, 2001.		(N/A)
Shot 115. As the camera continues to shake, Major Dinero Fleece (played by Eunice McAleer) struggles to remain in her chair, and Gummia Snax (played by Ina Kratzsch) struggles to remain standing. Hand-drawn storyboard made March 17, 2001. CGI storyboard made April 24, 2001.
Shot 116. As the camera continues to shake, Gummia Snax struggles to remain standing, and we can barely see Major Dinero continuing to struggle in her chair. Hand-drawn storyboard made March 17, 2001. CGI storyboard made April 24, 2001.
Shot 117. Doodad (played by Christina Boehm), hovering at her bridge console, spins uncontrollably in a clockwise direction as the camera continues to shake. Hand-drawn storyboard made March 17, 2001.		(N/A)
Shot 118. Monty (played by Terry Willacker), at his bridge console, reads his "RICK ROCKET" comic book, oblivious to the chaos around him. The camera continues to shake. Hand-drawn storyboard made March 17, 2001.		(N/A)
Shot 119. Continuation of Shot 114. Hand-drawn storyboard made March 17, 2001.		(N/A)
Shot 120. Continuation of Shot 115. Hand-drawn storyboard made March 17, 2001. CGI storyboard made April 24, 2001.
Shot 121. Continuation of Shot 116. Hand-drawn storyboard made March 17, 2001. CGI storyboard made April 24, 2001.
Shot 122. Coninuation of Shot 117, with Doodad now twirling clockwise from the camera's point of view. Hand-drawn storyboard made March 17, 2001.		(N/A)
Shot 123. Continuation of Shot 118. After a beat, Monty looks up from his comic book, finally noticing the plight of the ship and her crew. Unfazed he shrugs and returns to reading his comic book. Hand-drawn storyboard made March 17, 2001.		(N/A)

Using the hand-drawn and CGI storyboards, I then broke down the individual elements which would comprise each shot. This information was used as the blueprint during the production phase. The actor footage for this sequence was shot between April and June 2001.

Shot	Layer	Description	Shoot Date	Example Frame
114	1	Bridge viewscreen with starfield (CGI)
115	1	Bridge back wall (CGI)
115	2	Snax (bluescreen)	June 10, 2001
115	3	Bridge handrail (CGI)
115	4	Dinero (bluescreen)	April 28, 2001
116	1	Bridge back wall (CGI)
116	2	Snax (bluescreen)	June 10, 2001
116	3	Bridge handrail (CGI)
116	4	Dinero (bluescreen)	April 28, 2001
117	1	Bridge back wall (CGI)
117	2	Doodad (bluescreen)	April 29, 2001
117	3	Doodad's bridge console (bluescreen)	April 29, 2001	(Used footage for element 117.2)
118	1	Bridge back wall (CGI)
118	2	Snax (bluescreen)	June 10, 2001	(Used footage for element 115.2)
118	3	Bridge handrail (CGI)
118	4	Monty (bluescreen)	May 27, 2001
118	5	Monty's bridge console (bluescreen)	May 27, 2001
119	1	Bridge viewscreen with starfield (CGI)
120	1	Bridge back wall (CGI)
120	2	Snax (bluescreen)	June 10, 2001
120	3	Bridge handrail (CGI)
120	4	Dinero (bluescreen)	April 28, 2001
121	1	Bridge back wall (CGI)
121	2	Snax (bluescreen)	June 10, 2001
121	3	Bridge handrail (CGI)
121	4	Dinero (bluescreen)	April 28, 2001
122	1	Bridge back wall (CGI)
122	2	Doodad (bluescreen)	April 29, 2001
122	3	Doodad's bridge console (bluescreen)	April 29, 2001
123	1	Bridge back wall (CGI)
123	2	Snax (bluescreen)	June 10, 2001	(Used footage for element 120.2)
123	3	Monty (bluescreen)	May 27, 2001
123	4	Bridge handrail (CGI)

In August 2001 a fan-run sci-fi convention called SerenityCon III was to be held in Dayton, Ohio. I wanted to have something to present at the convention, so he spent a week of vacation making a trailer which would feature selected shots from throughout the film. One of the shots was Shot 117 from the sequence described here. I was still teaching himself about compositing, so he treated the footage that he assembled for the trailer to be "throwaway" -- made specifically for the trailer. If any material wound up being usable in the actual film, then that would be a bonus.

The "throwaway" trailer version of Shot 117 featured Doodad composited over a static rendering of the bridge. Camera shaking was simulated by simply shaking the actual composited frame! It was hardly an ideal solution, but it worked well enough for the trailer.

The Doodad costume basically consisted of a bottomless box worn over actor Christina Boehm's head and chest. Her waist and legs were concealed through the use of a "bluescreen skirt" which was adhered to the inner bottom rim of the box. This was surprisingly effective, although when the actor tilted away from the camera, Doodad appeared to have no base. This was intended to be fixed in postproduction, although there was no time to do this for the trailer, so it was left alone.

As I would discover, the lighting in all the bluescreen footage was so uneven and shadow-filled that he would need to spend many hours bringing each shot up to what he would call an "acceptably bad." I didn't have time to do this for Shot 117 of the trailer, so the shot is much more "noisy" than most shots which would be made specifically for the film.

Shown below are the storyboard, actor footage and sample frames of Shot 117 as it was composited for the trailer.

Storyboard (Hand-Drawn)	Actor Footage

Shot 117 (Trailer Version) - Sample Frames
Download the trailer version of shot 117

The sequence of Shots 115-124 was then shelved so that I could begin working on compositing shots for the actual film. I decided to proceed mostly linearly -- working on the teaser and the first act before approaching this sequence of shots from the second act. While working on these portions of the episode, as well as on the first scene of the second act, I began to discover ways in which he could move the camera three-dimensionally without distorting the 2D actor footage.

As I finally approached this sequence, he realized that he was no longer happy with its mostly static shots, or with the repetition -- viewscreen/Dinero/Snax/Doodad/Monty, viewscreen/Dinero/Snax/Doodad/Monty. I decided to replace the sequence with something more dynamic and exciting: a single shot of the camera traveling from the back of the bridge to the front, highlighting each of the four heroes. As each character struggles to stay in his or her place, the camera would also seem to struggle in order to stay on track. The idea for "Shot 114-A" was born.

Although this one shot would replace ten shots, the work was more complicated than all ten of the previously conceived shots. In the original sequence, each shot would contain at most two characters and would last no more than a second, so the amount of track matte cleanup was relatively small. Shot 114-A would last some 15 seconds, and would feature several seconds of footage of all four characters, each of which needed track matte cleanup.

The major constraint was to use only the footage which had been shot for the original ten-shot sequence. Years had passed between filming and postproduction of the new shot, the bluescreen rig had long since been disasembled, and my "studio" -- his old apartment in Cincinnati, Ohio -- had been replaced by a house near Dayton. For these reasons, not to mention the availability of the actors, costumes and props -- it would be nearly impossible to film new footage that would match the look of the old footage.

Another complexity was that the bluescreen footage could no longer simply be composited over static background shots of the bridge, because the camera would now move through the bridge throughout the shot. The only way to make Shot 114-A work would be to composite the characters into the 3D model of the bridge, and then move the camera around the bridge, all without exposing the obvious -- that each character was 2D positioned in a 3D environment.

My first test was to take the Poser models that he had used in the original CGI storyboards and position them in the now-completed 3D bridge model, and then define a path for the camera that would allow the existing bluescreen footage to be composited later into the scene. This was tricky -- for example, the footage of Monty had been shot waist-up, so no camera motion through the bridge could show any part of Monty except from the waist up. The most difficult footage to work with was of Doodad, who moved so much that at times, her head or an arm would swing out of frame. (This was no fault of any actor -- their movements were perfect for the shots as originally conceived.)

The following animation is of the bridge (minus many bitmapped textures) with the Poser stand-ins for Snax, Dinero, Doodad and Monty, and the camera moving more or less as it does in the final shot, but without the shake.

Now that I had the basic path of the camera defined, it was time to composite the bluescreen footage into the scene. Before cleaning up the footage, I decided to work with a single frame of footage of each character, just to make sure that it was aligned correctly with respect to the camera throughout the shot. I mapped each frame onto a separate 3D "box" positioned on the bridge so that the characters' bluescreen footage more or less lined up with their 3D stand-ins.

Boxes placed in 3D scene (as seen by a different camera than the one used for the final shot)	Bluescreen footage mapped onto boxes...	...with opacity information from bluescreen track mattes

As the camera moved, I repositioned and rotated the boxes as necessary to keep the characters reasonably well lined up from the camera's perspective. With the camera shaking and the characters moving quite a bit themselves, I figured that things wouldn't need to be perfect in order to look right in the final shot.

Next I applied the footage of the characters in motion, hid the 3D stand-ins, and adjusted the camera's position as needed in order to keep things looking right.

Now it was time to "clean up" the track mattes which were Adobe Premiere generated from the bluescreen footage of each actor. Like most of the rest of the footage shot for Astronuts, the footage that would be featured in Shot 114-A was... less than ideal for creating decent track mattes through chroma keying. Astronuts was my first major attempt to create a movie shot almost entirely against a bluescreen. I wanted to make a movie for as close to no money as possible, I wanted the characters to "explore strange, new worlds," I didn't want to be confined to physical sets, and I wasn't concerned about photorealism... and bluescreens just seemed like a lot of fun to play with!

Suffice it to say that more experimentation with bluescreening before starting production on Astronuts may well have saved me many thousands of hours (and counting) cleaning up track mattes generated from unevenly lit footage. On the other hand, I might have become so frustrated during experimentation that the movie might not have been shot at all! Fortunately the show did go on.

In addition to using garbage mattes, I took as many short-cuts as I could. For example, if I knew that a character's legs would only be visible for portions of the shot, then I would only clean up those areas of the track matte for those portions of the shot.

Before Manual Track Matte Clean-Up	After Manual Track Matte Clean-Up

Another step in compositing Shot 114-A was to draw a base for Doodad. As mentioned earlier in this article, the costume for Doodad's box-shaped body was basically a bottomless box that actor Christina Boehm wore over her head, shoulders and chest. Christina wore a "bluescreen skirt" to hide her waist, hips and legs, to help create the illusion that Doodad was a hovering robot. Whenever Doodad would tilt away from the camera, the costume's "bottomlessness" became evident, so for frames during which Doodad tilted away from the camera, I composited a simple, dark gray shape to represent the character's base.

Doodad with No Base	Doodad with Base

At one point, Doodad turns away from the camera, and the actor's arm became obscured by her "bluescreen skirt" -- so it became partially invisible in the composite. I corrected this by cropping out what remained of her arm, and then compositing her arm from a separate frame in place of the cropped-out arm.

Doodad with No Base	Doodad with Base

After more hours than I care to speculate, Shot 114-A was finished!

After completing Shot 114-A, I decided to recreate the sequence, just for fun, using the hand-drawn storyboards.

Special thanks to everyone who worked on Astronuts!