CGI with Live Action - Where to start?

[wingsofdesire]

I am directing a very short film. (under 5 minutes) The story requires the character to be chased through the woods by a bear. Since hiring a bear wrangler is out of the question I figured animation would be the route to take.
But I do not know where to start. What would be the best approach? Stop motion bear? Computer generated bear? Traditional animated bear? Or maybe taking filmed footage of a bear and interweaving it with my footage. I am going for a realistic style but in the low budget indie world that may not be doable. Any suggestions on approach, applications, software or whatever would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[CootDog]

Velusion! Great to hear from you again. Woohoo

I liked the masking you did on the meteor hitting behind the trees.

The thing that has be going is the ciggy. I have a couple questions.
This is how I think you did it, but could you please tell me HOW you actually did it.

I use Combustion so this is how I'd do that scene.
1) shoot the first sequence... walking down the stairs, place mug, place cigs then blow and hold position for a little bit.
2) with the props still in place, remove you and shoot some extra footage.

In combustion I know how to reveal, basically remove you from the picture to show the layer beneath.

But I'm thinking that you masked out yourself on a separate layer and had the background on another beneath it. Then added the smoke effect to the layer with just you and ended with that opacity at 0% revealing the extra footage on the layer.

So, please do, tell.

 

[Will Vincent]

Wow, you guys really hijacked this thread...


Wingsofdesire.. what about a combination of guy in bear suit and live footage of a real bear as previously mentioned? Might help sell the bear thing, even though it is a bear suit deal.. could be nifty

 

[Velusion]

CootDog,

Yeah, that's pretty much how I did it. I cut myself out of one of the frames and brought it into Maya where I used a fluid simulation to create the smoke effect then I composited everything in After Effects the way you just described.