User Stories Client: Michael Marcondes End client / project: Deiro Cine/TV The project brief was to create a shot of a large crowd of people carrying a giant flag. There were several challenges - the first one, being with the shot itself. As it was necessary to use library stock, there was no control in the production and being aerial footage, it was also very unstable. This required extensive tracking and masking. The sequence - which was shot from a helicopter - had a broken path, because the camera was on the shoulder of the camera man, without using steadycam. Further to this, without the time to create the flag from scratch another archived image was needed from which numerous mattes were created before being comped into the original aerial footage/shot. Marcondes also had to matte all the trees of the park as well as the buildings to enable him to 'place' people behind them in the shot. The second challenge was the deadline. The project was part of a political campaign with an extremely short lead-time, this added to the urgency to find software that was capable of dealing with such a complex task as well as being affordable and easy to learn and apply. Marcondes' search led him to The Pixel Farm and the PF bundle of BARN and MATCH was an obvious choice - not only from a cost point of view but also the speed - "fast, very fast", operability - "...easy to learn in a couple of hours..." and full of indispensable features. In a mere few hours this complex shot was tracked and completed. Michael Marcondes, says, "I love this software! This was a complicated shot, with significant time constraints and footage - as it was archive stock - that was far from perfect. The support team was immensely helpful and very fast helping me configure the software to my system. Without PFMatch, it would have taken me considerably longer to achieve the same result." Michael used PFMatch to track the shot, Lightwave 3D 8 for CG and Combustion and was working on a G5 DP 1.8 with 2.5Gb of Mem and 360Gb HD.