“Architectural” Titles Floating Over New York City
Panic Room’s slow moving, aerial opening title sequence features dramatic architectural shots above New York City. “The titles themselves are
constructed and fit so that they appear to be real and near but not attached to building facades,” says Orikasa. “It was important to
light and composite them so that the light shining on each title matches the lighting in the scene.”
“We balanced photo-realism with readability, and to give the titles a sense of weight, we worked on font selection, avoided redundancy in
plate selection and, especially, created a lighting pattern that insured that the light shining on the titles captured and reflected the light behind,
below, and around it,” Orikasa explains. ComputerCafe employed Lightwave’s radiosity rendering application to capture diffused lighting and
color from the environment, and add a “weighty” dimensionality to the titles.
Camera movement in the titles was captured, in part, using a method called Photogrametry. “Fincher shot background plates of the city,
then he wanted to alter the camera motion,” Orikasa explains. “We had to create 3D camera motion that did not exist
in the real footage. Photogrametry allows you to move a virtual camera freely by taking a still image, in this case from the architecture photo stills from a high-res
Imax camera, model the geometry of each building in the plate to match the still, then move the camera around. The result is the original shot scene
from a new camera angle or motion,” he says. “Some shots we created using a mixture of several pieces
of film and 3D textured objects.”
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