Had a gorgeous belly dancer in my studio....

[holly]

Here's some inspiration, I hope.

Had a gorgeous Belly Dancer in my studio this weekend. Here's some pics with some early fx applied.

[holly]

...and another in a different costume.

[holly]

She is shot on bluescreen and then in aftereffects I pulled the chromakey with Ultimatte. In the first (gold&black) costume I added some boiling "turbulent noise" as background and tinted it gold with Boris Tri-tone (a free plug-in I got from an instruction book, I think). Not too happy with the background because I want it to look more like liquid metal rather than blobs of smoke.... The only effect I put on her is the super wonderful plug-in from TRAPCODE (http://www.trapcode.com) called StarGlow, which adds sparkle to anything that hits above a set bightness level (ie: when the coins reflect the light StarGlow adds more glow and nice streaks coming off like a lens flare). She had little sparkles glued on her face and navel so these are always catching the light and sending out ZINGS of light!

The second shot (red and silver costume) is also keyed with Ultimatte, then I used her layer twice, as forground and background. On her background I used FE LightBurst which is supposed to make a dot of bright color look like a lightcone with a halo. Used here on her and her red scarf it takes over the whole scene but was incredibly slow to render.... Again I added StarGlow to the top layer to give all the glass beads an extra zing of light.

[kommy]

very nice as usual, hey i'll trade you some riot cop footage for some bellydancer-just kidding i know thats not a fair trade.
anyway my question is what do you use for a bluescreen-and how much are they?
ive always done ghetto bluescreen in the past, i think i need to upgrade

[holly]

I had mine made a few years ago at Rosebrand (http://www.rosebrand.com/A_Com/showprod.cfm?&DID=6&CATID=5&ObjectGroup_ID=34). I got the Poly Cyc cloth because it is one solid piece of fabric 10ft wide with no seams. They sewed in the hems and added grommits and stuff. I think it ended up costing me about $115 in all, but if I had it to do over I might have tried the Spandex because then you could just stretch it and not worry about wrinkles. I got a chromablue vinyl floor from them also and it is so perfect-blue in the camera.... I wish I could afford to get more of the floor and somehow attach it to the walls perminantly because the vinyl is such a smooth color, but it is really heavy and I'm not rich and unfortunately a curtain is easier to hang than a big vinyl wall....

I was seeing really inexpensive bluescreens on eBay a few months back. They looked really good and came in different sizes, so try there also. I remember thinking "damn, that's a good price". You have to use the search word chromakey (http://search.ebay.com/ws/search/SaleSearch?satitle=chromakey&ht=1&sosortproperty=1&from=R10&BasicSearch=). Blue or green. It doesn't matter which.

[Lara]

Holly she looks beautiful, that second image is arresting- such wicked contrasts between the drama of the red scarf, the black background and the lovely light effects. That one screenshot really evokes a particular sense of character, she is much more than just a figure if you know what I mean.

Mmm, very sexy too, inspiration ;)

[vjrei]

There is a problem with the chroma and her hair, what a pitty, may be fading a bit or may be is the picture. I like the colors a lot and the girl is a pro.

I had 3 Belly dancers in my sister's wedding, it was my mother's idea.:rolleyes:

[k8eepants]

the lighting's lovely and the movement too......have done a couple of shoots with a belly dancer friend of mine, but never got the movement you've got and just in a still too!
was fortunate enough to haven indian temple dancer at the same time and got some interesting energy going on with the two different styles of dance, different rhythms, etc, but t'was a while ago and my vid camera skills weren't up to the task. been promising myself a reshoot ever since....
liking your style, lady. thanks for that.:)

[vjpixylight]

nice look holly!
we(SpaceBunker) did some professional dancer shoots b4 we left on the short festival tour with some visualz being played on nude women painted up with white theatre bodypaint which turned out quite nicely...I think using dancers, be it belly or ballet has a nice way of showing the softness of the art...
Since the VJC members web page crashed, I have no place to upload them too, but that will change shortly..:sad:

[mandala]

looks great, you are appealing to my islamic background here Holly :)

vjrei had a point about the hair. you might wanna try a seperate garbage matted pass just for the hair, maybe keying into the red channel only, then do an additive mix between the two alpha channels (only) to bring back some of the fineness in the hair. Also, it seems that maybe the spill factor (on edges) is set low. A blur of the matte channel with a slight contract should do it. Watch the bubbling here.

/end rant

I've been keyeing out hair all week for a BBC/ACTF production, so i guess this point really stuck out for me :)

would be good to see the moving image, belly dancing is such an exotic form of mind/body stimulation.

[vjrei]

Originally posted by mandala
looks great, you are appealing to my islamic background here Holly :)

vjrei had a point about the hair. you might wanna try a seperate garbage matted pass just for the hair, maybe keying into the red channel only, then do an additive mix between the two alpha channels (only) to bring back some of the fineness in the hair. Also, it seems that maybe the spill factor (on edges) is set low. A blur of the matte channel with a slight contract should do it. Watch the bubbling here.

/end rant

I've been keyeing out hair all week for a BBC/ACTF production, so i guess this point really stuck out for me :)


After all that I rather leave it like that :rolleyes: