How'd they do that?

wow - i wonder how many cameras they used to do that. then again they could be all models and they removed the strings later. there's a number of ways you could do it. all would take a very long time and a whole lot of money.

I kind of felt like it was 3D, the characters being mostly the same cops and clowns...

I honestly can't figure out how they did that. A 3D-modelled scene seems the most likely thing, but if that's the case, the texturing is unparalelled. I did note that there's little-to-no motion blur on fast-moving objects within the frame, particularly the paper money that the camera flies close to. I'm going to search high and low for an explanation of the method used to accomplish this.

I found a very similar video on another stock video site. In the forum he kind of explained how his was done.

Here is an excerpt.

" We asked the actors to freeze then used motion tracking software and 3DS Max to composite the plane, paper etc. I have to say that the 'talent' held their pose brilliantly."
"We used boujou to track the camera. It took several passes and was slow to calculate but worth the wait."

Since Boujou is a $10,000 software package he says you can also use PFhoe from pixel farm with some success.

Jake

Yeah I can see it now,

I would have guessed Boujou actually, andrew kramer has a tutorial on how to use boujou. Boujou is the best 3d tracking software IMO, Ive seen it used on tutorials, its pretty much calculates the exact positions of objects so that you can render 3d models in the scene pretty easily.

So you could film a scene, and Boujou will calculate the distance and dimensions of an object in a scene and will put 'markers' (actually bones) in 3ds max and the max camera will match the movements of your camera exactly.

Didn't know about PFhoe.

The Iphone has an app that will do that

my iphone has an app that will make your iphone cry.

I don't have an iphone so I'm not scared, will it make my crappy flip phone cry?

LOL

I don't think Boujou is the answer here. Boujou is for tracking existing camera moves, not creating new ones. This camera move is too complex for any dolly/gib system and too smooth and controlled to be handheld. My guess is that they had a large "scene-scanning" system. This uses multiple cameras to take a simutaneous snapshot of a set from different angles, then the computer uses the different perspectives to extrapolate a 3D reproduction of the entire set at the instant the shots were taken. They could have fired off twenty or thirty sequential shot sets in a split-second and then picked the set of shots where the moment was exactly right and everything was exactly where they wanted it to be (the cop getting kicked through the window for instance). This would also explain how all the textures are so perfect, they're mapped onto the objects and environment from actual photos. This explanation is the only possible one, unless there is some new "star trek" technology I'm unaware of.