Unbelievable Waterslide Compositing Walkthrough
Posted by eric on August 5th, 2009
I really enjoyed the healthy discussion this video generated. From a guy that’s done a lot of compositing, I can tell you it’s definitely faked. This might not be so obvious though, so I thought it might be interesting to walk through how I think they put this together. The guys that made this were able to do such a fantastic job, in part, by making some really simple, smart decisions about how they went about shooting. In this post I will walk you through the compositing process and how these decisions culminated in a video believable enough to make anyone second guess their initial reaction to it.
First off, for those unfamiliar, compositing is the art of combining several pieces of separately shot footage to appear as if they are one piece of footage. It’s a relatively simple process that involves cutting out bits and pieces of different clips and creatively reassembling them–layering them, moving them around, offsetting them through time, scaling, rotating, blending them, attaching blurs, color and level changes, etc. to make everything appear as if it were shot in camera.
In this video there are three separate shots.
1.) The Master Shot: The dude sliding down the slide and flying through the air
2.) The Splash Shot: The dude landing in the pool and making a big splash
3.) The Victory Shot: The dude climbing out of the pool and being congratulated by his buddies.
The Shooting Process:
First, they create their three pieces of footage. In the first piece, they filmed this guy sliding down the slide. In the raw footage, this probably looked like a regular dude sliding down a giant water slide. He didn’t go nearly as far as in the finished video. At the end of this piece of footage, the camera pans over to the empty pool and holds for a beat before zooming in on it.
Second, they film the guy jumping into the pool from a stunt platform. The framing of this shot matches the end of the master shot.
Third, they shoot the guy emerging victoriously from the water. This shot also starts framed up to match the end of the master shot and then zooms in to get in on the action.
