Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Quick D: Anamorphic Bin

Ladies, Fall season is here.

So bust out the ellipses because

dots are in!

[upbeat rock music]

I mean, I don't know much about fashion,

but they must be in!

Because what other possible explanation could there be

for this video having two and a half million views?!

[mystical synth music]

It's about two blurry dots, one dot moves slow,

Another dot moves fast, then one abducts the other!

And this conclusively proves

or totally disproves the existence of extraterrestrial UFOs!

...According to the world's saddest comment thread located under the video.

But if you look closer, they're actually tiny flying pigs.

Because guess what? Anyone can track a point on the foreground features in this handheld footage

and stick in whatever primitive dot animation they want!

Meanwhile, in another quadrant of the YouTube™ Galaxy,

a creative video maker who incidentally is the source behind many trippy

perpetual .GIFs you've probably been coming across for years,

* /gifs/*

made this.

A real trash bin becomes a false-perspective picture of a trash bin on the pavement.

For realsies!

A cool mind-bender, no?

Well, I like it. It's almost more mind-bending for someone familiar

with visual effects than it is for an average person

See, when I look at it, I know that making the bin appear as a flat image on the ground is not that hard,

but I also know that the *real* bin had to still be there, obscuring the view behind it,

and making that invisible was the real challenge.

Allow me to illustrate using this ordinary cat.

We film the cat sitting on the ground, then pick a frame where the anamorphic effect will start.

We then motion-track the rest of the shot using planar tracking.

Unlike point-tracking or 3D-tracking, planar tracking analyzes whole clusters of pixels in a given plane,

to track how that plane appears to distort over time.

When we apply this tracking data to the still frame of our cat, we cause that frame

to follow the optical distortion of the ground plane for the rest of the shot.

But when we isolate the cat to make it look like a picture on the ground, the real cat behind is still visible!

We have to disguise it with a patch of the background from the still image.

But that only works if whatever the cat obscures is flat along the ground surface.

Vertical objects will distort incorrectly, so we must isolate those and anchor them to the ground plane

using a mathematical expression, crafting which will take most of you the rest of your natural lives...

Unless you look it up in a very old tutorial on a popular After Effects™ plugins website.

And so, whether it's a cat, a droid or a trashbin,

our clever perception-challenging visual effects shot is complete!

And like the mighty Dave of Sheepfilms,

who had to clone a post and patch-composite some shadows and a skateboarder

to make his effect flawless,

we are ready to publish our masterpiece and receive the viral avalanche of ...

4,600 views?

Wha–?

*inaudible cursing*

*sigh* I guess there's just no accounting for lack of taste.

*dialing* Hello, Coast-To-Coast? Yeah I seen a UFO object. It was flying real high

with a blinking light.

Huh? About as fast as a plane.