Christina Maria - Peak Performance project - Intro shot

Ive spend the past 3 days trying to figure out a way to extract a killer intro-shot from some very hasty handheld camera flybys of a paper maché mountain on a poorly lit greenscreen-backdrop. My struggles  simply comes down to a severe lack of planning. We met up at 11 pm on Friday evening to come up with an idea for the clip and we had to shoot it Saturday morning at 10 pm. I encountered 3 main problems due to this poor lack of planning;

1: We only had 3 lamps to work with which resulted in a poorly lit greenscreen, a poorly lit subject and a white paper maché mountain standing way too close to the backdrop = Green spill light on the mountain and lots of it.

2: Motion blur and grain on the footage: Due to the "low light" conditions I was left with footage that was both grainy and had a lot of motion blur, and the fact that we did a hand held shot with a miniature didn't help my 3d tracking process much either.

3: My worst nightmare: OLD TAPES! I cannot emphasize this enough; DO NOT use old tapes! Always have a stock of tapes for your camera laying around (if you still use tape). Because of the time pressure and my very hectic work schedule over the past months, I simply hadn't thought of buying new dv-tapes for my small hv30. And because I keep most of my footage in an archive, I didn't have any empty ones, so one of my friends borrowed me a bunch. Unfortunately they are quite old and packed with pixel errors and digital noise. That is even worst than just ordinary noise. It leaves great big squares on your shots and tends to cut out parts of your footage...

I tried every possible angle available: 3d tracking, camera projection, I even went as far as to try Nukes 6x's excellent 3d tracker/projector, and I actually managed to get got somewhat of an OK result out of it, but the hand held motion of the camera was pure horror and I quickly realized that it would take several days of work to fix the camera movement, key and roto out the mountain, build Vancouver in 2,5 d etc. etc. etc.

So instead of sitting crying in front of my computer I simply decided to cast away the footage of the Paper-Maché mountain that Peter and Christina so beautifully built - and simply make a graphic solution instead of a high grade one. I still used the Mountain though. I just extracted some closeups from the flyby and put it back together in Photoshop. And I will use some of the shots for a later scene in the clip. Ill see if I cant get around to edit a making of at some point after finishing this clip...

The intro (around 10 sec) took about an afternoon to piece together...

A screenshot of the "P3 Christina Maria Viral" intro: