How we made Amy Dallen fly as Super Beatrice for The Doubleclicks
The Doubleclicks have a new album called The Book Was Better. They’re great, and their music is both good and important. They hired me to film and edit music videos for Panic and Super Beatrice, and I was excited to learn that Super Beatrice was going to fly. I have wanted to film someone flying for as long as I have wanted the power of flight. The trouble is that we didn’t have any cables, harnesses, industrial fans, or whatever else filmmakers use when pretending a person can fly.
What we did have was access to the YouTube Space in LA, with a big enough green screen (pre-lit, thank goodness), a green sheet that Laser ironed most of, a couple of stools, clothespins, and Amy Dallen in a bad-ass superhero costume.
Here’s an example frame in its original format. Off screen to the right is a fan blowing her hair, and off screen to the left is Rick Budd waving her cape. When you compare this image to the iPhone photo above, you can see I messed up her skin tone. I was mixing lights that had different color temperatures. You’re not supposed to do that.
Fortunately, Super Beatrice’s power armor includes a white belt, so I sampled that to fix the white balance.
She looks less like one of the Simpsons now, but a little pale, so I added a little red and took out a little blue.
Good for me. I can fix my mistakes. The next step (I should point out, by the way, that my process didn’t necessarily follow this order; I fiddled back and forth quite a lot), was to remove all the non-Amy bits with a Keyer. I used both the Hawaiki Keyer plugin and the default Final Cut Keyer tool for different shots in the video. Sometimes one works better than the other. I have no idea why, probably math co-processors or gamma or something. This was the best I could manage at keeping Amy whole and removing her surroundings using the keying tool:
I decided to postpone fixing the sheet-covered stool and pick a background instead. Hey, look, there’s that harbor from the PS4 Spider-Man game.
I didn’t want it to look like every Superman-style movie ever, so I thought instead of showing a classic skyline, let’s show just enough so that it’s obviously a big city.
And then blur the background so we stay focused on our hero.
There was one problem with using this video clip as a background, which was that the camera is tracking to the left, and if I flipped the background to fix that, the cars would be moving backwards. So I flipped Super Beatrice instead, which had the bonus of giving a logical reason for light on her face: the sunset.
Then I stood up, and stretched, and sat back down to draw dozens of little dots around the spooky black mass that was supporting Amy, and make the computer pretend it wasn’t there.
This looked pretty cool, but still fairly fake, because Super Beatrice was keeping pace with the camera, and I realized that flying wouldn’t really be smooth. She needed more wind resistance and/or turbulence, so I added the Handheld effect to both her and the background, and I slowly animated her out of frame as the clip progressed.
I think that this looks pretty bad-ass. But I wanted to make it a little more romantic, what with that sunset off screen and all, so I warmed up the skin tones again.
I didn’t know what else I could do to sell the illusion of flight, given our constraints, but then I remembered that clouds are often a thing you see in the sky, and since I had isolated Amy, I could add clouds both in front of and behind her. I used a nice clip of some smoke, twice.
Then I added a LUT over the entire video to make it a bit more cinematic. I used one called Space Generation that’s in the Blockbuster pack from motionvfx.
Then Laser said (I’m paraphrasing), “how do you feel about making it look like a TV show from the 1980s?” I felt like it was worth trying, so I converted the timeline to good ol’ NTSC 4:3.
Oops. Super Beatrice got cut in half. Who am I, Doug Henning? I’m sure not. Let’s reposition our hero so we can resume the illusion that her whole body is flying.
I asked Laser, “Do you want it to look like the viewer is watching it live in the 1980s, or like it was recorded and played back on a VHS,” and they chose “live,” so I added some fake interlacing / scan lines but kept it light on the glitches / vertical roll / what-have-you.
Of course, if you really want to sell the magic of flight, you need to see the superhero’s whole body, plus her boots are too cool:
Enjoy the video below: