Link via digitalcontentproducer.com
The shot Snyder wanted starts with Kennedy’s motorcade arriving, with the camera dollying around. “It’s a God’s eye view because you actually see Zapruder filming the scene,” Hirota says. “Then you see the impact of the shot, and the camera pans around and you see the limo speed away.” Snyder’s twist on history was to include the superhero character The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as a player in the scene, embodying the belief of conspiracy buffs that there was another shooter besides assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. “Our camera pans over, and you see The Comedian on the grassy knoll going behind a picket fence,” Hirota says.
CIS Hollywood used a combination of 3D CG elements and 2D matte painting projections to re-create Dealey Plaza. Hirota’s team used Adobe Photoshop for matte painting and Autodesk Maya to build 3D elements and to do the matte painting projections. “We built 3D geometry where necessary and we rendered it in [Pixar] RenderMan,” Hirota says. “Because the camera was moving so much, we’d then take an image and project it back onto the geometry that we’d built and see how it all worked. When we had it in 3-space, sometimes we’d have to clean up the painting projected on the 3D models to make sure that there was no stretching. The moving camera is why we couldn’t just track in a 2D matte painting. The camera is both moving in 3D space and it’s panning around. The camera travels down the road as well, so the environment had to be 3D.”
Photoshop CS4 Extended is available at an academic discount price of $299.
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