You are sitting in your living room enjoying a beautiful binary sunset, when suddenly your hologram goes off. It’s a call from your brother-in-law wanting to say hello. What do you do? So sets up the next installment of our Star Wars fan film production series.
If you missed the first in our series, you can check out Episode 5: The Cheesy Scroll Strikes Back here. Even though it is Episode 5, it is really the first in our series-- we actually plan to go back and do the first four installments at a later time when technology advances... or something like that.
Anyhoo, on with our lesson.
How do they do that?
Holograms have become a recognized staple in the Star Wars universe, from the first time Luke cast eyes upon a tiny Princess Leia asking for Obi Wan’s help, to the more recent "walker" hologram that transported the evil Darth Siduous down the palace corridors of Naboo. Lucasfilm, Ltd. and Industrial Light and Magic usually have tight lips when it comes to revealing how their effects are done, but I did some research on the Internet (everything on the Net is true, of course), and have pieced together a plausible answer for how the early holograms were created.
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As technology has improved, this low-tech approach to creating holograms has given way to more high-tech methods using chromakeying and post effects. Fortunately, Lucas and company decided to keep the low-tech look of the effect, and we’ll do the same. For this tutorial we are going to take the high-tech approach and cover chromakeying and compositing using blue/green screen techniques, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects 5.x Production Bundle, and Sound Forge for some audio tweaking near the end.
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Even though this tutorial is aimed mainly at a postproduction process, I have decided to take some time to discuss blue and green screen techniques, because frankly, there isn’t a lot of good information out there, and confusion seems to be the word of the day for fan film producers when it comes to shooting for special effects.
How does chromakeying work? In the early days of television the camera used tubes for each of the color (or chroma) channels (red, blue, green). By "turning off"or making blind one of the tubes (blue, for example), it would create a "keyhole" in the video that could then be filled with a different video source.
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| By making the camera "blind" to certain colors, you can create a hole and fill it with another source. |
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