Hasta La Motion!

I have been reading this forum for quite a while now and really appreciate all your efforts helping us first-timers out.

Awesome community I haven’t seen for a while. Plz keep on going…

To cut a long story short I’ll just explain why I started this thread.

We (five film students from Austria/Europe) are actually planning our first VFX shot. We are having experience in film, 3D (Maya / 3DSM) and AE.

To get to the next level – we would now love to get more into compositing and VFX in general.

After writing the script, making the storyboard, working through some moods/references and reading into some lecture like "Digital Compositing For Film And Video – Steve Wright", "The DV Rebel’s Guide – Stu Maschwitz" and "Matchmoving: The Invisible Art Of Camera Tracking – Tim Dobbert" we actually reached a point where we would love to get some first hand advice about what we should take care about.

First of all – we are working on a night scene where a car (with people inside) is slow-mo crashing into a tree on a lonely street through the wood.

Some reference videos we found through our research are here:

I also attached our "storyboard" (but don’t expect to much, it’s more like a shotlist 😀 )

As you can hopefully see we have several shots – some inside the car, some outside. If possible, only the car and it’s accident should be CG.

Sooo…back to my question. Is there some kind of a procedure we could follow? Hope those question aren’t that stupid and to basic at all 😮 .

1 Should we film the empty street and later composite the CG car onto it?

2 How about the actors sitting inside? Should we use greenscreen windows and make the moving environment outside the car later? (for example storyboard nr 1 & 6)

3 Where to place the tracking marks best for the matchmove of the moving camera?

4 How many tracking marks are usually necessary?

5 What would be the easiest way to get a smooth camera movement of the driving car? (storyboard nr 1, 3 and 4)

6 Does anyone have some suggestions which plugins (especially for 3DS) we could use to simulate the crash and the car deformation best (cloth, reactor,…) ? Or is it even better to make a car rig for the deformations and animate it by hand?
How about the particles in it? Something like the Rayfire Tool or Blastcode?

7 My last question. Which compositing software would you recommend beginners to start with? Nuke, Fusion, …? I did read a lot of topics about them around here but I am still not that sure which one to choose and give a try for such a shot.

No matter what – I appreciate every advice you could give and point us in the right direction.

Thx 🙂 !

Liebe Grüße,
Philipp

Btw: Sorry for my bad english