Ghost Whisperer: Ghost Magic
Oct 08 2009
Animation/ Visual FX/ Art Direction: Music Video
Ghost Whisperer/ CBS
The TV show, Ghost Whisperer, not only broadcasts a television show, but also contributes to an online presence with further content and features.
In this instance they hired Vince Marcello [ IMDB ], to create a Ghost Whisperer themed music video for Keaton Simons [ http://www.keatonsimons.com/ ], that would also have an interactive component incorporated into it.
When I got the call to join the project, it had already been picture locked, and needed assistance on creating the visual style and spear heading getting the enormous amount of visual effects completed in a very short time.
The issues I had to confront were LARGE. Mainly that the entire video wasn't shot on a green screen, which meant that all the floating ghost parts had to be hand rotoscoped, frame by frame. OY!
A second issue was that there were recurring bumble bees throughout the video, and they looked liked DICK. It was originally created in Maya, but animated so poorly that I re-did 90% of the shots myself in After Effects.
"If there were a boxing match between Maya and After Effects, you'd be in the ring for After Effects."
- Vince Marcello, as I replaced 4 days of rendered bees in 4 hours.
The most important part of the project was creating the ghost effect for Keaton. My objective was to create a look like light being projected trough smoke. Once this was done, the next hurdle was to set up the complex effect in a simple fashion so any other graphics people could easily drop their elements into it without any tweaking. The final tweaking would happily be done by me in the end.
At the 11th hour, someone decided to add a the Ghost Whisperer's car to the video. A car we didn't have shot! For that clip we had the production office run out and shoot photographs of the hero car on the set from various angles. Taking those, I got rid of the reflections and cut them apart in photoshop. In After Effects I built a fake 3-D car I could move a camera into and stuck some b-roll of Keaton behind the wheel.
Here are a gallery of stills of the shots that I worked on. You can compare them to how they may have changed or not in the final video at the bottom.
