To cut a long story short, after starting a few ideas and not following them through, I decided to make the idea about the in brain sat nav.
I decided to have a man loose his keys in the garden and have the sat nav HUD guide him to them.
Here is the storyboard I used to film with.
I did have a few problems. Firstly, I filmed on a standard definition DV camera. The footage looks ok, but motion tracking was very difficult as there was no real definition for it to focus on. I was advised to re-film in HD. So I borrowed the Sony HD DV camera and filmed again. The footage was very clear and motion tracking was not so difficult.
Also, the first time I filmed, I didn’t put anything specific in shot to track to. The second time I shot, I used an orange squash bottle to track to, and in the garden, used the washing line to track.
The HUD consisted of a battery indicator, signal bars and the arrow that pointed to the lost item. I made all of these icons in Maya and exported them as PSDs to retain there alpha layer.
Here is the final video.
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I think that the final product was acceptable. I think that after reading my description it is clear what is going on. Some of the HUD looks a little basic, could have done with some more detail. The motion tracking worked pretty well considering it was very wobbly, hand held footage, although in places the arrow didn’t move when needed.
If I were to do it again, I would make an introduction screen describing what this was. I would add some distinct tracking points in and edit them out after for some smoother motion tracking. Finally, I would add some more features into the HUD such as distance traveled, time, speed ect. like a normal sat nav.
