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© Mark Platten 2006

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	virtual environment - 3ds Max - After Effects An interesting project, placing a live actor within a totally surreal, synthetic environment. Need I mention that anti-schizophrenic drugs were associated with the end-product - if not my participation in the production process? A stack of video footage arrived on my desk, to reconcile with a basic verbal description & storyboard of camera moves across a given metreage. Meanwhile, an actor was filmed against green-screen, and a capture house rig exported the moves of a camera rig as data in Kaydara's .fbx format. I received the files I'd be working with, but after numerous phone conversations, we weren't touching dimension base. CAD files and scaling issues instantly put me on my guard as a matter of principle, but this project was a slightly different order of magnitude. Eventually, we nailed it down.
	Anyway, back to the original intent. The action fades between sepia and colour, as the character steps in and out of a surreal world. With green-screen actor + camera motion control data recorded at the same time and imported into 3DS MAX to animate a virtual camera in the 3d corridor I constructed my own dummies prior to final render. My output - including much crash-test dummy sticker style tracking data - then shipped to a 3rd-party production house for compositing in Flame.
	Viewing the final cut, it was vindicating to realise it would have been entirely possible to achieve identical results in After Effects: the out-sourced techniques - adding mirror reflections and shadows, etc - were certainly intuitive enough.