A Day in the Life of New York City
The Sandpit is a beautiful short film by Sam O’Hare that shows New York City in miniature using a shallow depth-of-field. In an interview on Aero Film, O’Hare says,
It is shot on a Nikon D3 (and one shot on a D80), as a series of stills. I used my Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 and Sigma 50-150mm f/2.8 lenses for all of these shots. Most were shot at 4fps in DX crop mode, which is the fastest the D3 could continuously write out to the memory card. The boats had slower frame rates, and the night shots used exposures up to two seconds each. [...] I shot over 35,000 [stills].
I did some initial tests a while back using a rented 24mm tilt-shift lens, which is the standard way to do this. However, after my tests, I found it made much more sense to do this effect in post, rather than in camera [...] The entire shoot was completed in 5 days and two evenings, during the hottest week of August 2009.
We found it interesting that the tilt-shift effect was faked (as was most of the movement of the camera).
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how did he fake the tilt shift effect?
your movie totally made me smile. :)
I LOVE this. Would love to know how you fake the tilt shift effect, too.
Hi guys, and thanks for the interest, it's nice to make you smile!
The tilt-shift effect was done in Eyeon Fusion, using a plugin from Frischluft called Lenscare. It allows you to take a greyscale image and use it as a depth matte, effectively assigning a distance from the camera to each pixel in the image. You choose a tone of grey to be in focus, and the rest of the image will fall out of focus the further the tone is away from the selection. So mid-grey might be sharp, and black and white areas would blur the most.
You are able to specify aperture shape which determines how the bokeh appears, and the amount of defocus to suit the shot.
There are other tools that do a similar job, including Magic Bullet Looks and the Lens Blur which is native in Photoshop and After Effects.
So insect like and yet I am so proud.
What is the music in this video? I was looking for 'Human' but I found only some GrindCore band :D I think that's not the right one :D
sam this video is fantastic! thank you for this great piece of art!
Hiya,
Human are a music and sound design company, who generously donated their time and skills to the film. You can find them here: http://www.humanworldwide.com
Sam
I love it!!
It's a great video!!
Fantastic!
[...] petapixel / original: [...]
[...] to. Michael Zhang, recently continued his streak of sharing seriously awesome art with his post, A Day in the Life of New York City in which he wrote about The Sandpit an unbelievable short film by Sam O’Hare that shows New York [...]
Gruesome!
Love it!
[...] find it super interesting, and relish in its excellent posts. Posts I especially enjoyed include A Day in the Life of New York City, A Gigantic Rube Goldberg Machine, Dogs Filmed at 1000 Frames Per Second, Facity Documents the [...]