The Football Manager - Moving Picture Company

2d tracking for stabilization or corner pinning.

One scene shot in a deserted Wembley stadium presented a unique challenge to compositing artist Angela Barson. 'What made it extremely difficult was that the director wanted a documentary style feel so it was shot using a hand-held camera and an unrestricted zoom lens. This resulted in a very wobbly shot with unknown lens distortion. Any slippage of tracks was going to be really obvious and with the main character in shot taking up about a third of the screen for the entire shot any of the tracks that you would normally pick up on were disappearing.'

It quickly became clear that the shot could not be tackled in the conventional way without making a serious impact on the schedule: 'I tried doing it with a couple of methods that we'd used for other shots in the film and it just wasn't working,' Barson continued. 'It was going to take two weeks at least just to know that I had a solid track, and we were getting to the point where we would have to drop the shot because it would take too long to complete.'

Although Barson was working on the shot as a 2D composite, she decided to try boujou in a last attempt to save the shot. 'We brought it in and with some help from 2d3 to show us how we could use it in this particular shot we knew in about 3 or 4 hours that it was going to give us a successful track. So then it was clear that the time I would have to invest in the compositing would be worthwhile.'

The secret of boujou's success for MPC lay in its ability to create a full 3D model of the shot, and therefore to accurately predict where tracked features would be even when they were out of the frame or hidden behind the actor. Crucially this predictive capability made it possible for the crowd footage to be pinned to the corners of the seating banks throughout the shot, but Barson also found it useful for adding smaller details.

To assist MPC in completing the work on the movie, boujou's development team added the facility to export the 2D feature tracks to compositing systems such as Inferno, Shake and Cineon. The track export facility is now standard in boujou.

'We subsequently used boujou on six or seven other very difficult shots in the movie because it was so successful when we just didn't think we were going to get that first shot done,' Barson concluded. 'It's saved us weeks of work we would have spent tracking a shot to see whether the result was actually going to work: with boujou, 2 or 3 hours was enough to show us that the shots would work.'