« Bredstik Films and the NFC | Main | Craig's Variety Show »

October 25, 2004

Night Vision Technique

I had occasion to revisit Eugene Elliot because of an upcoming screening. In the course of doing so I came up with a technique to convert regular video to convincing night vision video. I don't know of the applications for this technique, but I could see doing a parody of the Paris Hilton video for starters. I go through it in the extended version of the article.

So I started with the following sequence. It was the anchor for the third act Eugene Eliott. It was a three beat camera movie with some great mugging from Craig:

Original Video (wmv 1.5 MB)

As you can maybe tell watching the video, it's a bit dark. When shown in a theatre, or even on TV, it is really hard so see Craig's face. It was important to me that this scene come across, as it was important to us in the design of the whole movie.

So the first thing I did was changed the levels, which produced a very grainy image. Being a mockumentary, I tried to come up with a justification for grainy video. I came up with the idea that since it was supposedly a documentary, I could allow some awareness of the camera. I thought that simulating night vision would be acceptable. So I upped the amount of green in the video. This produced a reasonable approximation of night vision.

Now that I have the green look of night vision, I didn't think it was right to just change the image without the proper explanation. Since no other scene in the movie looked like that, I had explain ot the audience that the camera was making a change to night vision. I did some titling to do that.

Now that I had a solution I just had to time them properly so that it looked like the camera operator made the change. So I did three things.

• Waited until we had a closeup of Craig.
• Used selective title display to cause the text to blink.
• Used Guassian Blur and keyframes to simulate the camera re-focusing after switching to Nite Shot mode.

Check out all the changes together in the video.

New Video (wmv 1.5 MB)

Granted, the applications of this technique may be a little limited but I figured it might be worth sharing. Enjoy, and tell me if you can think of any applications for this technique.