The Molecule show the less-glamourous side of VFX

While definately definitely not as impressive as blowing up a building or transforming cars into giant killer robots, fixing gaffe’s in common video is big business.  The Molecule has a short post up showing some recent work they did for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein to fix a “bad tie job”.

The process involved a few steps in order to make the tie lie in its proper resting place. We began by tracking the tie, this meant we had to bring it into shake and apply tracking points to it. From that point we then rotoscoped the best frame we had of Blankfein’s shirt and tie. After scaling the frame a bit, we were then able to composite the tie and shirt back on top. Final finishing touches were applied, such as graining for continuity of the image, and voila the tie was risen!.

Now, it’s a tiny thing, just removing a shirt button to make the tie look better, but things like this bring rise to questions about how can we tell when Real is Real?  Several photographers have been busted in the last few years for doctoring photos.  How long until CNN or some major news agency finds that their video has been doctored?

Update: Corrected spelling.. Kinda surprised FireFox’s built-in spellcheck didn’t pick it up.

via Everything looks better after The Molecule: The Subtlety of a Button.

About the Author: Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Graphics the molecule, vfx