Our midterm is done, and I have to say I’m pretty proud of the way it turned out.

After getting our materials and checking out the DepthKit, we got to work. We spent around 3 days trying to get the DepthKit to work (one day shooting, one day calibrating and another day shooting after that) and eventually gave up on it.

The images were off, the calibration took me 2.5 hours (with the help of Ziv and Supreet), and after we finally got calibrated images into the software, it was impossible to make it work. Long story short: the software worked with the jacked footage, and it didn’t work with the right footage.
Because of that, we decided to give the green screen a shot. We set it up, make sure it was as taut as possible and shot the video. We did a number of takes, imported it into after effects, and in 2 minutes we had the video we had been wanting all along. Hallelujah!

After that, it was time to build the stand for our hologram. Because we wanted it to look like part of the shop setup (meaning not quite finished, and rough looking) we found some scrap wood in the shop, cut it into two 90-degree triangles, and voila. We needed a 45 degree slant for the plexiglass film in order for it to work, so it was perfect. We set up a bed with a pocket in the middle for the phone to fit into and hide, and placed a scrap piece of wood to add to the unfinished look of the whole thing.

From there, it was show time! It worked beautifully, we got some awesome reactions, and finished off with a great pepper’s ghost illusion!