Fall 2018

CS194-26 - Final Project

Vertigo Shots + Fake Miniatures

Regina Ongowarsito - cs194-26-aeq

12/12/2018

Vertigo Shots

0: Summary

This was done by taking a series of pictures: at the farthest point, take a picture of the subject with the highest zoom level. At the closest point, take a picture of the subject with the lowest zoom level. Make sure to keep the subject in the same general area of the frame -- this helps with the general "collapsing in" feel of the vertigo sequence.

Camera: Nikon D3300.

1: Results

Sproul Gate
Bay Area View
Bear Status, Part 1
Bear Status, Part 2
Sproul Hall
Dwinelle

Failure Case?

A few things went "wrong" in this one:

  1. The subject doesn't remain in the same section of the frame in the picture sequence,
  2. I did all the zooming and positioning correctly, but the intended object is so far away that it kept in parallax and this effect didn't really do anything, and
  3. in the other shots, items surrounding the object changing perspective also helps with the effect, but in this case the Campanile is mainly against a plain-ish background by itself, so it doesn't get helped by that trick at all.

It does have a weird (read: cool) sitcom/late night talk show opening B-reel vibe to it though, so in a way, it's a success.

Campanile

Fake Miniatures

0: Summary

This effect is created in a few steps:

  • Bump saturation: Before any other step, we bump up the saturation in the input picture by converting the colorspace of the image to HSV, adding a value to the S dimension in all pixels, and then converting the colorspace back to RGB. We do this before any other step because bumping up the saturation after any blurring creates weird color artifacts in blurred sections.
  • Mask: We have to make a mask to apply the blur effect in a controlled manner. We make a mask with "soft" edges, following user input of coordinates. We do this by blurring the inputted polygon, then normalizing the mask such that the highest value is 1 and the lowest is 0. We also provide as an option to define complex DOF by doing a second round of coordinates input, where the polygon produced from this round is just set to a full 1 value in the mask.
  • Blur effect: We create a gaussian stack of the input image. Then, for each pixel in the image, we determine which of the blur level we use for the final image by the value inside that pixel. The darker the pixel value, the deeper the gaussian-stack level used for that pixel.

1: Results

Shuttle

Before
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, pre-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur
Results

Farm

Before
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, pre-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur
Results, w/o Object Mask
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, pre-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur + object mask
Results, w/ Object Mask. Notice that the farm-house has less haze to it.

Rocketship

Before
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, pre-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur
Results, w/o Object Mask
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, pre-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur + object mask
Results, w/ Object Mask

Lower Sproul

Before
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, pre-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur
Results

Upper Sproul

Before
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, pre-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur
Results
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, pre-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur
Results

Intersection

Before
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, pre-blur
Mask, inputted shape of gradient mask, post-blur
Results

2: Bells and Whistles: Animated Fake Miniatures!

This effect is done by capturing burst images of the target scene and grabbing every 10th picture from the captured images, of which we then apply the fake miniatures effect w/ consistent parameters through all the frames.
Upper Sproul
Lower Sproul