Who we are
We are a small indie firm with offices located in San Francisco, California and Paris, France. For more information about us and other things we are working on, please visit our site http://plutinosoft.com.
The Idea
8 months ago, our 6 year old labrador was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. After we had to put her down, our children were missing her so much that we thought we could maybe build an app using videos of her we had recorded over the years. The idea was to not just playback videos but include interactivity in a way that it felt real enough for a 3 year old. Unfortunately we needed something more “staged”, videos that we could “loop”. Instead, we decided to record videos of cute puppies in a more controlled environment. We also had to build a special recording app we called “Segment Capture”, that would let us overlay a live feed over a previously recorded video. This was important to create videos we could stitch, loop or transition to and create an impression of continuity.
Setup
Being an indie developer with no money, we couldn’t afford renting a professional studio, lights and videographer. Instead we set one up in our garage. First, I read this awesome Green Screen book. A bid on ChomaKey Lighting kit on Ebay later (such as those), some plywood and construction material from Home Depot, we were ready to build our own green screen. Then we created some custom studio lights thanks to Victor Milt’s site http://victormilt.com and Serena Stuart’s instructions.
Calibration
With the green screen in place, we set up a test dummy to figure out the best position for the lights, to minimize green splash and get a good matte. The HD camera is a Canon XHA1 inherited from my old job. We connected it to a MacBook Pro running the ScopeBox scope software to measure the green screen’s luminance level. This, we learned, is crucial if you don’t want to spend hours with AfterEffects hand-rotoing each frame to extrapolate the image data you were trying to matte!
Trial and Error
A couple of craigslist ads and posted flyers later, we had our first contestant. Well it was a disaster! The dog could not follow the script, let alone stay in place or listen. The “Segment Capture” required that the dog be somewhat repositioned in the same starting point for each new video. It was just not working out. So we had to improvise and ditch the dog – for now. We did try my 7 month old baby boy for a few hours, which was kind of working out since he was not moving much yet. However we decided to look into using a puppet. That’s when we found the awesome work of Kevin Gorby at Luna’s Puppets and fell in love with Lenord.
Recording
After multiple attempts, the best position for the puppeteer was to lie down, which makes the manipulation a bit tricky. We set up a a TV to mirror the Segment Capture app we wrote.
Post-Production
AfterEffect was used here by Alex with all sort of plugins for handling matte, roto-framing, morphing, noise-reduction filtering, video reencoding and more.
In parallel, we started the app development with a video engine framework capable of seamlessly and instantaneously cross fading multiple videos at once. This is not a simple task on iOS since only one video player can be instantiated and playing a video at any given time!
(Note: We intend to package and release our engine once the provisional applications for patent have been filed.)