For the short film ZIEN, Studio Speets was approached to help out with one of the scenes that needed to be put in the film. One of the shots had to feature a painting frame on a wall, where one of the actors would swipe through the paintings on a tablet, thus moving the paintings inside the frame – as if they were being swiped through. There was one big problem though – there was no painting frame.

This shot however was one of the money shots for this short film, so it was of utmost importance that it looked good. Couple that with the fact that the camera was behind the actors and the painting was supposed to be in front of them – meaning that parts of the painting had to be masked out and occluded by the silhouette of the actors in order to be placed accurately in the film footage. Not doing this would break the illusion of the painting really hanging in the room, because then it would just be overlaid (superimposed) on the film footage.

First off; the base model of the entire painting frame was made in 3D modeling software, and then imported into a 3D texturing software for further detailing with sculpting and texturing. That model was then imported back into the modeling software to track it into the film footage, and rendered out. This rendered animation was then imported into video editing software to composite it into the film footage correctly and occlude/mask out the painting where the actors were.

The result is a convincing scene that features an object that is not in the original film footage, enhancing the visual aesthetic of the film and creating a scene that is impossible to capture on camera. Some audiences the film was shown to did not even realize the painting was “fake”.

ZIEN was produced by Oupro Media and a lot of people worked on it. You can view the entire 6 minute film and credits on the dedicated website www.zienfilm.nl