We Have Something, Have We Not?

With the opening of the Pie Spot just a few weeks ago at the Ocean complex, I've completed principle photography on the documentary short I've been working on. Now I need to cut the thing together. Oy. I'm totally guessing but I think we're up there in the shooting ratio of 80:1. The idea for the short is to use it as a promotional piece to garner funding for a feature length cut, but we want to have enough in the can to make a fuller version should that rainbow lead to a pot of gold. I'm definitely calling in favors on this one! The short has to be high polish to show the level of production quality we can achieve.

Enter ADi. Kate, the kindly owner of this establishment, has agreed to help out with some cool 3D transitions, maybe even an intro animation. I haven't even had the gall to mention the lower third keys yet. :) [She proofs these posts before they go live, by-the-by.] Anywho, I've got these delightful CAD files from the architect and now the question is, how do I make the best use of them? I have a few ideas...

We've shot a bit of timelapse photography in and around the building, not true timelapse, mind you, but just setting the camera up on sticks and letting it roll a good long while so we can speed up 10, 20 minutes into a nice seven second shot or so. One idea I had was to treat the CAD of the building in a similar fashion. Show the building (or a portion of it) being built "brick-by-brick," as it were, to replicate a timelapse-type shot in the virtual world.

Another idea that I had was to use the design files as a transition mechanism for match angle shots. Start with any shot you have by matching perspective, cross dissolving to the 3D, then flying the camera around to the position of the first shot of your next sequence and dissolving back to live action. A variation of that would be to use the 3D as a transition for before-and after shots if you haven't gone to the painstaking effort of matching perspectives in the live action set ups. The key there is to actually make your perspectives different enough that it motivates the transition to 3D--and the virtual camera move.

Lastly, I can really see the usefulness of using 3D to give a lay of the land of the complex. A map would work too, but 3D is way cooler. Why use a static overhead still (or even 2D animation) when you have a dynamic crane shot from the storefront to birdseye view virtually at your fingertips?