foot clutter: the tendency for people’s feet to get stacked up unnaturally when combining single shots together to form a group shot.
Example:
This is from the promo materials in development for the web pilot. Each character needs to be in its own layer, so they can stack up for animated graphics.
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April 12th, 2008 at 6:11 am
Hey these are my shoes! (red Converse) *G
April 12th, 2008 at 7:22 am
Ha! That’s nothing! Check out these masterpieces…
April 12th, 2008 at 7:45 am
The problem is the lack of depth between the characters. Move the characters on the back row higher up in the image and/or scale them down a bit.
Also, the perspective is a tiny bit different between the shots.
April 12th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
You try scrubbing it out.. You try soaking it out… And you still get… Foot clutter!
Ok, time for me to throw on my geek hood: The problem could lie in the fact that each picture is taken with no thought as to the context of the final collage, thus each character stands in a way which is comfortable, but which has no relationship to the final grouping. One way around this would be to first stage the picture using stand-ins and map the foot postions of each character. Once the map is complete you could use it for foot placement for the individual shots.
Just a thought (albeit an odd one.)
April 12th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I agree with Frank. At the very least mark each foot as the shot is taken and don’t let anyone else obscure the mark. Composing the photo like Frank said is the best way and will give the best result.
Also, make sure you lock down the camera with regards to focal length, aperture, shutter speed, position, etc as well as freezing the lighting to make it as natural as possible. Doing so will make them all look like they came from the same photo. This is also where pre-composing the shot gives you an advantage as you can set up the lighting and check the depth of focus to make sure everyone is in crisp focus (or you can just rely on your photographer’s calculations).
April 12th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
@Peter:
Great link. Added to Off-Topic.
@Frank and Joe:
Group-and-separate would absolutely be a great choice, assuming…
Failing these first three conditions, we’re doing pretty well with our photo comp.
April 13th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Nines is “ON DEMAND” too.
April 13th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Almost looks like it could be the bottom of Weezer’s blue album.
http://www.tprice.net/disco/weezer/blue.jpg
April 14th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I don’t get the bit about stacking up for animated graphics. Does that mean things like animated web ads?
I wish shows and movies would just pose more group shots, all the obviously photoshopped heads and bodies get annoying after a while. That said, I have to admit I couldn’t see a problem with many of the pix on that bad photoshop blog.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I’m supposing this is the technical term? :-P