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Hi, I'm Eric Paré from Montreal, Canada,
I'm a photographer for a team mostly with light painting
bullet time, and stop-motion techniques.
This is "Lightspin", my project I did in this studio here
with 24 cameras and contemporary dancers.
We did some dances in the dark,
but then I went to Burning Man in Nevada
in very harsh conditions of the desert
to create some stop-motion sequences
and playing with light.
After that I went to India to make a music video called "Suspended".
Now I'm back here in Montreal
and I am experimenting with poses on the floor
and this is what I'm going to do for this new project
that is called the TEN Collection by Fotolia,
and I'm going to work with this guy.
Hi, I'm Mike Campau, I'm a digital artist from Michigan, United States.
I've been doing digital art and retouching for over 15 years professionally.
I was going to tell you a little bit about myself
but I've figured the best way is to show a few projects that I've done.
Probably the first project that I'll show you is "Motion In Air".
It's one of my most popular projects
and it combines CGI with live-action dancing models and photography.
The second project that I worked on
was in collaboration with another photographer
and was called "Future Of Sports".
And that combined photography done in the studio
with live-action sports doing motion
combined with my CGI futuristic worlds.
And finally the last project I want to talk about
was a lot of fun because I did the whole project from beginning to end
from photography, to CGI, to post-production.
But today I'm here to talk about Collection TEN from Fotolia,
and I'm going to be working with an awesome photographer, Eric Paré,
and him and I are going to be combining our skills
to create some awesome images
that I hope you guys are looking forward to seeing.
When I looked at your work I thought it was a good idea
to incorporate the warmth and light,
and then coming to Montreal in the winter
and how cold it was,
I thought it would be a great mix of...
warm and cold weather.
It's just temperature, but also lighting and subject matter.
So, you know, the idea kind of sparked looking through your work
and the kind of location we're in right now,
combining the cools and the warms
and how that was going to come together.
And I really didn't have a full image in my mind
until I got here to the studio
and saw you working with the light
and saw how you created that warmth
and the light had shape to it
and it kind of inspired me to take it to the next level.
In the beginning of the project
we went into the little black studio
and started to experiment with different kinds of light,
different colors, different stylings for the model
and we chose to take the metallic powder one
as it was the most effective effect that we got.
Welcome to my studio.
This is where I'm doing light painting.
This is all black, because it's much easier to do light painting
in a black studio where there's no light leaking in windows.
For this project I used three cameras. I could have used only one
but having three cameras helps me get better angles
as I don't see what I'm doing because I'm with a model
and I don't see the pictures.
The settings for the cameras are pretty basic
it's about F9, ISO 800
and always use the bold mode and a remote trigger
because you will want to decide
the duration of the exposure every time.
Sometimes you go slower, sometimes you go faster,
so you need that kind of remote just to trigger the picture.
For the lens, you do your focus first
and then you put it in manual mode.
Just to make sure there's no lag for the focus
because it won't be able to focus in the dark anyway.
So, I always shoot in RAW mode, it's much easier,
with that you get more details from the highlights and shadows.
But for me it's also about going very deep in the cold colors
with the white balance.
Most of the time we shoot with daylight
this is very typical for light painting
but I just slide down to the blues
and that gives a totally different mood.
And also it's much better for Mike if I shoot RAW
because he's used to that
and he will be able to get much more details.
Preparing your model is very important
One of the key phrases I'm using is that
everything is integrating.
We really have to be in synch
to make sure the model doesn't move during the exposure.
If the model moves, it's gonna get blurry
and you don't want that.
To do light painting you need a flashlight
or any source of light.
In my case I use a very powerful flashlight
it's 300 lumens
and I'm using some metallic sheets of paper.
So, this one here is very light,
and you can see through the paper
so I'm using it around the model.
And sometimes I will use the strobe mode
which will give stripes instead of a continuous light.
The thing that I use for the final image
is this one here.
It's a rainbow-like metallic sheet of paper
and you can clearly see different colors.
And this is what I use to make "S" shapes around the model.
It can get pretty intense sometimes
to play in the dark with the lights
So put some music, just experiment with different colors
different styles, different shapes.
Don't limit yourself with a single shape,
go crazy and try different things
and create your own style.
With light painting there are so many possibilities
it's endless!
I usually keep the post-processing very simple.
I work with the RAW files
so I will play with the white balance
some curves and just basic levels.
But for this project I will just keep all my little clean-up layers
and give that to Mike so he can continue from that file.
So, after we had our final select of the girl in silver
I took that image back
and started to create a quick photo-illustration
so that Eric and I could prepare for the next step
which is shooting outside.
We're on top of Mount Royal and it's very cold
it's minus 17 degrees Celsius !
And we're here to shoot the background image for the final creation.
I did some wide-angle shots of the trees
and Mike is here to get mostly smaller pieces
or higher definition crops.
Yeah, you're shooting for background composition
I'm shooting parts and pieces, like gnarly trees
silhouettes, some cool architectural pieces
that will get kinda placed into the image
and I'm shooting at a pretty high megapixel camera
over 36 megapixels.
So I can crop into little parts and pieces
that'll fit into the main image
that will match the resolution that you're shooting.
So, when I got the final image from Eric
I took that into Photoshop and had to isolate it.
I had to use the Path tool in this case
just to get a clean outline of the girl to get started.
And then I'll go in with Channels
and start to isolate hairs and little details on edges
to get a perfect mask for the girl.
And that's kinda the starting point for this project.
When I work, in general I'll have the hero image
and I'll go to a stock site to get either inspiration
or look for other assets that I'm not able to shoot myself.
I'm really looking at light and shadow
and making sure that the shadows and the lights
are coming from the same places
because nothing gives away a composite more
than the shadows not matching or lining up
or the same light quality in the object compared to the background.
That's a dead giveaway that it's a strip
and I try to keep all my images to look believable as one shot.
My inspiration came from Eric
and how he folded this piece of paper
and the shapes it created while he was moving it
and the light itself.
So, I tried to mimic that in my CGI sculpture as well.
And using the light from Eric's shot
I used that to illuminate my sculpture that I'd built in CGI.
So, when working on the CGI project
I'm using Luxology Modo.
It's a 3D software package that I love
because it does high resolution renderings pretty fast
and it has a nice rendering engine.
So, when I was using Modo I was building an object
in the shape of Eric's light.
So, to do that I would create a polygon
and then create a curved line
that kind of mimics the shape and the style of Eric's light painting,
and then I take that polygon and I extrude it along that path.
Then, after it's extruded, I will take key points in that object
and start to scale it, rotate it, and blend it a little bit
so that it's not a consistent shape
because when you curve extrude
it's gonna make it consistently the same shape
from beginning to end, so I try to add a little bit of character:
some bends, some folds into it
until I get it to where I like it,
and then I set up the lighting and rendering.
So, the final portion of the CGI is setting up the lighting
and getting it ready to render into Photoshop.
So, what I did was I created illuminate shapes
that mimicked Eric's light painting and put them in the scene
and then hid them from the camera so you couldn't see the light
but it caused the reflections in the lighting
on the model just as if it was there in the studio
while Eric was shooting.
So, once I had that set up
and then I set up a render with different layers
and what I will do is a shadow pass
a reflection pass, a diffuse pass
and then alpha passes for different segments of the object.
And the reason I do these is I can bring them into Photoshop
and control the lighting and shadow on the object
after it's rendered - so I don't have to go back to the 3D program
to get different quality render at the end.
When I'm compositing objects together in backgrounds
it's really important to keep in mind
where these objects have contact points
and where they interact with each other,
because how light bounces off of objects nearby
or casts shadows from one object to the other.
So, one trick to get this technique
is to take an eyedropper
and sample a color from an object nearby
or behind your hero object
and then use that color to either brush in on the edges
or where it would influence in a soft light or an overlay layer.
And you kind of play with the opacity
to get the look that you want
and to make sure that it blends in nicely.
So, now that I have all my images composited
and they all look believable
the image usually has kind of a hyperreal color quality to it.
So, this is when I get into the final color grading of the image.
So, one of the tricks that I have to finish my images
is using a plugin called Topaz Adjust.
I've over the past few months been playing with it
and honing a certain style and settings within Topaz
to create the look I want.
So, as a CGI artist it's really important to understand
the idea of light and shadow and how to use it.
And the best way is to go to a photo studio
or watch a photographer work.
You know, I first wanna say thanks to Fotolia
for bringing me to Montreal to work with Eric.
It was an awesome experience.
You know, I learned a lot about light painting
I've always kind of seen it and was interested in it.
So, it was a great experience.
Yeah, thank you, Mike. Thank you, Fotolia.
This is something I've wanted to experiment since a long time.
To bring some graphic elements to my pictures
because it's always dark around my light.
It was interesting to see
how Mike filled the empty spaces of my pictures
with stock photos and CGI elements.