For a while now I have wanted to try my hand at compositing having been inspired by guys like Dave Hill, Erik Johansson, Dimitri Daniloff, Tim Tadder and by agencies like Taylor James. What has prevented me from getting started is developing an idea to work on.
I decided after several failed attempts that trying to develop an original thought was pointless and that copying an idea to practice was the best start. All learning is started through replication and repetition, so the starting point is finding something interesting to copy and copy the hell out of it! Some consider copying to be a bad thing to do and dislike their idea’s being emulated. My own view on this is that if you try and pass off what you copy as original work it very much is a bad thing, but it isn’t if you are using it as a spring board for personal and creative development.
The idea I settled on was a scene from a Disney film called Tangled. The part of the film that I decided to base the composite on was the lake scene near the end with all the Chinese lanterns. The scene itself is not complicated to replicate. So I took a screenshot, setup a psd and proceeded to plan the process of recreating the scene.
Breaking Down The Scene
The first process of planning is to break the scene down and then workout how to create those individual parts. There are four main parts that make up the scene:
- The background
- The lanterns
- The couple
- The boat
The background
In the film this is just a blurred out sky and city. I took a photograph of the sky during the day to get some natural gradients, drew the outline of the castle using the pen tool, added some Gaussian Blur and then added various textures to blend the background into the lanterns creating a kind of hazy mist effect.
The lanterns
I tried to source a variety of lantern shapes but, as it turns out, there is not a huge variety of Chinese lanterns shapes out there to accommodate the various shapes seen in the film. Chinese Lanterns also have no real internal structure, so the only way to get the shape is to light a candle under them.
This creates a couple of issues with the first being a fire risk. The second is that in order to capture sufficient detail and tone to make a worthwhile manipulation you would need to execute a long exposure, which for a lantern that can only hold its structure whilst being heated proved to be impossible as the heat source causes the lantern to move. So an alternative was required.
I did some googling for paper lanterns and found hanginglanterns.co.uk, who sold three basic shapes: rectangular, tubed and a sphere. I bought one of each in white (this would make colour manipulation much easier) and made a setup using a boom arm and a L.E.D lamp, as shown below. I set the camera on a tripod (Nikon D300, I did not need a massive megapixel count for these) and took some shots once the lantern had stopped swinging. I moved the camera into several different positions to get a selection of shots for variety.
The lantern section itself is comprised of two parts, the visible lanterns and blurred lanterns in the distance. The stock shots would make up the visible lanterns in the foreground. But trying to shrink, blur and rasterize these assets to create the distant lanterns seemed pointless. I played around with a few techniques and decided that a simple soft edge brush with colours taken from the reference image along with using variable opacity did the best job to create the bokeh effect of distant lanterns.
The Boat
Trying to find a suitable boat proved to be a challenge on two levels. Firstly, cost. Similar boats can be hired, the cost was at a minimum of £500. Far too much for my planned budget of “cheap as possible”. The second issue would be lighting. It would require a lot of work to either get a boat to remain still in the water and then lights into a position that would then also match the later to be photographed people who would sit in the boat. It would also be a lot of work to get the boat out of the water and do the same.
The only solution that seemed to work was to hand draw the elements of the boat and use textures. I amped up the brightness of the reference shot using a curve adjustment layer and traced out the parts of the boat using the pen tool to create some vector shapes. I then took samples of colour from the reference shot and applied a few gradient adjustments and drop shadows to create the natural tone gradient and seems between wood panels. This looked ok but it was lacking that wooden look wooden boats are known for.
Whilst there are more than enough tutorials out on the web on how to create wooden textures I figured I might as well just use a texture I shot a few weeks earlier of some African Oak. I laid this out on the comp, blended them together and then used the soft light blending mode to allow the gradient and colour from the vector shapes underneath to come though the texture layer. I then shaped the boat using some black gradients and then created the reflection. Its also important to clip the texture to each individual layer and then adjust its position, otherwise it will look too uniform.
The Couple
The initial idea I had was to do a planned shoot with a couple of friends and to create Rapunzel’s hair using a wireframe wig and support it in place. This idea fell through for a plethorea of reasons.
One day I was talking to my friend Holly about the problems I was encountering with this project. She had booked me to photograph her wedding a few months earlier and I was describing the whole lantern background idea whilst showing her the current work in progress shot on my phone. She said “I would love to have that many lanterns at my wedding!” and so the project was back on.
The first challenge I had anticipated when photographing the couple would be the lighting as this is key to blending images seamlessly in composites. The lighting setup in the film is a complex rig with multiple light sources. I own three studio blocks, two soft boxes and a brolly. Clearly I was not going to create the exact lighting used in the film, so it was going to be a case of excessive compromise and then use some tone adjustment techniques in post.
The wrap lighting I placed two soft boxes either side of Holly and Billy, the brolly I placed at the front about 3 meters away. All of this was setup during the reception on their wedding day, a time when most wedding photographers dedicate to doing nothing but mentally relaxing and eating. Instead I unloaded and setup a portable studio in a side room at the venue. As I had five minutes to work with the couple before heading off to get some shots of them before the evening festivities, taking test shots and dropping them into the comp to see if the setup worked was not an option. I had to best guess the lighting and hope everything worked. Which, thankfully, it kind of did.
Blending the image together
The final stage I went through was blending the foreground into the background. A trick used by 3D studios is to wrap background light around foreground subjects. To achieve this I duplicated the lantern layer without the background, moved it up the stack, added a touch of blur and reduced the opacity. I then used several layers set to the colour blending mode to hand paint on to the couple any other reflecting colours. A few tonal adjustments were made using the curves tool with a luminance selection and I added an average blur layer and reduced back the opacity to blend the colour of the entire scene together which is a technique I picked up in Matt Kloskowski’s book – Photoshop Compositing Secrets.
The Final Composite
Below is the final shot which is you hover your mouse over will allow you to compare the scene from the film with my own take on it. And below that is a step by step timelapse of all the layers being put together.
Why buy a photo frame when you can make one!
To finish the whole project off I decided to hand make a photo frame from reclaimed wood and then give the composite as a framed print to Holly and Billy as a wedding gift…this took a few days but was very much worth the effort. Below are some photos I shot whilst building the frame.
2 Comments
Congratulations, very well done!!
You ought to feel very proud of yourself. Your description of the process was enjoyable as well.
Congrats!!
Cheers John, glad you enjoyed :0).
Paul.