Early on in this project we knew wanted to do something really unique to kickoff the upcoming mens basketball season.  Who better to inspire WKU's faithful fans than Ed Diddle himself? Here is a behind the scenes look at how we brought the infamous coach back to life.

We started with the iconic picture of Diddle walking out of the stadium. This was the catalyst for the rest of the video. The idea was to transition the coach from the vintage picture into the modern-day arena. The camera follows him as he turns and looks around, the arena comes into view as he envisions the glory days of old. Next we see a vintage WKU team magically appear as they play in the modern arena. Plus we get some words of wisdom about the current team from the legendary coach before he disappears into the hall. It's a very simple concept, but with this project it was defiantly 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration to pull this effect off.

The first step was to match the camera position and focal length of the original photo. This turned out to be impossible because the original camera position was in the bleachers using a long lens. Obviously we could not lay dolly track in the bleachers. We were able to get pretty close by using a 45mm focal length closer in. At this point the mismatch became a "fix it in post" issue.



Since this project involves 3d motion tracking we added some simple gaff tape tracking markers to the walls and floor. This was critical because not only did we need to generate a CG camera from the data, we needed to know the actual location of these markers in Z space in order to build matching geometry in 3d.



Once the shoot was done we painted the real coach Diddle out of the picture and tweaked the image to match the 45mm focal length. The next step was to track the footage and export that data into Cinema 4d. Once the tracking data is in C4d, the basic workflow is to rebuild the structures that exist in the original picture. Then project the original picture on the geometry using a feature in C4d called "projection man" it's extremely intuitive and sure beats projecting on flat planes in After Effects.



At this point we have 3d footage that looks like the original picture and precisely matches the camera movement. The next step was to rotoscope in Randy Johnson our modern day Diddle.

In the middle of the video we thought it would be cool to see legendary players from the past play on the modern day court as if Diddle was imagining it. All of the vintage footage was motion tracked by hand, mostly frame by frame and the movement was applied to a 3d camera in After Effects.

We were honored to work on this project and we couldn't have done it without a really good team. Thanks to Austin Upchurch, Randy Johnson, and Greg Evans.



Sharing knowledge makes us all better at what we do. I'll be updating the blog with more behind the scenes features, so if you are interested stay tuned. If you want to know more technical information about this project such as what gear and software we used, feel free to drop me a line.

Dave@FleckMedia.com

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