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How do I get a bicycle to move without a rider?

G

gorillaonabike

I'm talking about a bicycle without a rider. It is a critical element of a future short and the bicycle is extremely heavy - think about a bicycle so heavy (panniers, electric motor etc...) that it cannot physically be lifted by a normal, adult male. I only need it to move for two to three seconds on screen.

I am thinking camera angles and a small trailer but does anyone have any CGI experience for this?
 
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If you don't need to see the entire front tire, you can get a couple lengths of flat bar stock 4 feet long or so, drill a hole in each of the bars and bolt them to the axle of the front tire. Then you can either attach a clevis or handle to the other end. If you go with a clevis, you can attach it to the back bumper of a pick-up truck and drive around with the bike and film your heart out. Bonus is that you can shoot from the bed of the truck and make turns with nobody on the bike (the handlebars will turn as if an invisible person is riding the bike. If you need the cranks on the bike to turn while it's rolling, lock out the rear hub.
 
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I would take a bunch of pictures of the background you want to pass by while the bike is going along. Then stitch them together as a panoramic image in photoshop. Take a still image of the bike preferably on a green screen. Key the bike out, roto the wheels to seperate them and do some clone brushing to fix the parts of the wheel you cannot see, due to other parts of the bike. Comp the wheels back in, put an animated rotation on them, with motion blur. Put the backdrop in and have it pan behind the bike. If keeping the ground out of the shot is okay it will make it very easy. If you want the ground in the shot, you can fake some contact shadows and displace the tire images when they contact the ground to make a smushed look. You could also duplicate the background and using the bike you keyed as an alpha & make fake animated reflections on the bike as it rides along. Just put some lens distortion in it preferabbly spherical, because reflections tend to wrap. Then lower the opacity until desired level of reflection is aquired.
 
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