Loading Time - Floating Solo

[Graham]

A look behind the zero-G scenes of Floating Solo!

[plummeting_sloth]

Heh... I loved all the problem solving going on with the weightless objects. And all the bits with the freezedried foods gave me some Iron Stomach flashbacks

[Lyinginbedmon]

Alas poor Googly Penguin, we knew him briefly

[Foxmar]

Now I want to try some freeze-dried ice cream.

Nice problem solving weighting down the objects so they "floated" better. Defiantly made it more believable even if you could see the fishing line in the final video.

[Scud422]

Oh please tell me that the end was a teaser for the return of Iron Stomach.

[Drecon]

Dennis Bergkamp! Dennis Bergkamp! Dennis Bergkamp!

[Can't Wear Hats]

I still don't buy it. Clearly it was all filmed on a rotating replica Moonbase housed in the International Space Station.

The bits where Paul is outside? A soundstage on Mars. WAKE UP SHEEPLE

[JayBlanc]

Now, I know we all hate to have our illusions shattered, but I've a bombshell to drop on you guys.

Astronauts don't actually eat freeze dried ice cream.

In fact, it's only ever been eaten in space once (Apollo 7), and never again.

They abandoned the idea of most freeze dried foods because a) they caused crumbs which is a super big problem in micro-gravity, b) there are better preservation methods for most foods, c) no one really liked freeze dried ice cream that much.

The Shuttle had space for a freezer, and the ISS does too. Astronaut food is mainly lots of frozen ready meals tailored for eating in micro gravity. People who can't cook and mainly eat hotdogs and mac&cheese share more with Astronauts than you would think. Altho Astronauts eat more frozen veggies, and don't have access to pizza delivery.

[Lorithad]

If you guys ever attempt a floating object on green screen again, might I suggest green thread? Would that work to hide the string?

[Graham]

The problem with green, is that then you'd see "through" it to whatever was being composited on the screen. REally, we just needed black thread, or matte line. The line reflecting light wasn't planned, obviously.

[Foxmar]

The problem with green, is that then you'd see "through" it to whatever was being composited on the screen. REally, we just needed black thread, or matte line. The line reflecting light wasn't planned, obviously.

So black thread would have fixed that? Interesting to know. Should do a Loading Time on green screening techniques some day. Im sure you have lots of secrets we don't know about.

[Lyinginbedmon]

Yeah the main two rules for hiding things on a green screen are 1. don't use the same colour as the green screen and 2. don't reflect light (thereby making it visually obvious on camera)

[Graham]

Well, black thread wouldn't have reflected light, and would've been less noticeable.

[Alex Steacy]

We're learnding.

[Graham]

"When will we learnd?"

[King Kool]

When I entered the Lightsaber Choreography Contest VIII, we did a few Force Push tricks where something is tossed into the air with fishing line. In one shot, it caught the light for a few frames and you could see it (though probably not with the Quicktime compression). I incorrectly surmised that they used black thread on Ryan Vs. Dorkman 2 (as you can see in the behind-the-scenes DVD) because you can always see it and get rid of it if you need to.

As the visual effects artists in the room said later, black colors become more submissive when in motion, so there's actually LESS you have to paint out. Trey, the older VFX artist noted that you can hit the fishing line with a little sandpaper to kill the reflectiveness (though thinner line could have also helped, but we just used what he had on hand).