Posted on 06.29.09

Adventures in Video Masking

by Tim Frick

An animated exhibit for the Shedd Aquarium offers some unique production challenges.

We recently created a twelve-minute animated 3D penguin habitat scene for the John G. Shedd Aquarium as part of the Oceanarium Reimagined, a significant overhaul to that portion of the museum. At twenty-five feet wide by fifteen feet tall and spanning across three HD projectors, the animation provided many opportunities for us to roll our sleeves up and put on our technical problem solving caps, not the least of which was the fact that it needed to nestle snugly into the organic crevices of a man-made rock formation.

Our hope for a seamless and pixel-perfect blend of rock and animation was to project a still frame onto the wall surface and use Photoshop’s path and pen tools to create an editable mask that could be tweaked as necessary to assure a clean break between the projected video and irregular edges of the rock wall. Once we got onsite, however, we very quickly realized we needed to take a different approach.

Dataton’s Watchout software is a super-powerful application for creating large-scale cinematic experiences that involve video, audio and interactive triggers. The software was chosen because of its power and flexibility to run our animation sequence along with a multi-channel soundscape (created by Open Sky’s Steve Wilke). Much to our chagrin, WatchOut doesn’t currently support any sort of masking or path tools.

It does support native Photoshop files, however, so though we weren’t able to create a mask live over the rocks in real-time as we had hoped, we were able to pretty quickly eyeball its parameters, make path edits in Photoshop, and update the file in WatchOut to see the results. It wasn’t a perfect scenario, but after a few hours of intense tweaking, we came up with a solution that was pretty tight. Even though it only took us hours rather than days with this workaround, it would be great to see WatchOut support this feature in future versions.

The kids seemed to enjoy the results too. On opening day the system needed a restart while about fifty kids dressed up as penguins were playing on the rocks. It was extremely gratifying to hear the collective enthusiasm as our animated penguins burst to life right in front of them. Yet another reminder why I really enjoy what we do.