On April 1st this year Mario the skipper of the Dom Bosco became famous for the Straightforward Crab he found. It actually walks in a straight line! Even scientist Bob Elwood from the School of Biological Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast said ‘This discovery might open up a whole new field of study in Biology!’ It now looks as if there is a whole colony of these newly evolved crabs off the coast of Cornwall – how exciting!
The whole seafood industry has been intrigued and particularly Waitrose who are the main retailer for seafoodandeatit.
We saw this news story on GMTV and thought how could this quirk of nature have been undiscovered for so long. It set our guys thinking about how they could fool the world and produce a video that was just as convincing as that news story.
Here’s how they would do it.
First the video would need to be captured of Mario placing a real crab onto the ground at which point our compositing experts would have to remove the crab from shot and replace the floor underneath creating a blank canvas to position a fake cgi crab.
Next, the cleaned up video would need to be camera tracked in PF TRack to generate the 3d camera track data that when placed in the cgi environment would replicate the real life setup.
Once the Track data had been imported then a cgi crab would have to be created that could be made to walk forward.
Using Cinema4d this cgi crab could be rigged and textured ready for its walk sequence.
Now to make the crab walk and follow the camera move which had already been captured by the tracking data. Then to finally render out an animated cgi sequence to composite into the cleaned up background movie. Once in place the final file would be graded and sound effects added.
The final movie would finish up like this – so good it could be real.
For more information on Shelly the crab check out seafoodandeatit.com where you can follow Mario and his new discovery.
Client: Seafoodandeatit
Agency: 23 Red
Cgi and Compositing: Danny Holden & Tamsie Thomas