Often when making video reference its hard to see how the body is moving in certain angles because of the foreshortening of the arms or legs. Or an arm is covered by the body in certain poses.
In those instances it would be nice to have video reference of different angles of the same action. I experimented with this with my last shot and it worked pretty well for me.
I used a two camera setup with a flipCam, and my old videocamera but you can use as many camera's, or phones with video function as you like.
Step 1.
Place al the props and place your camera's. When you are ready for your acting performance, start all the separate camera's. To be able to sync all camera's later you can either switch the light on and off or make a fast movement with your arm or something else so you have a reference point when you edit the video's later.
Step 2.
Do your acting performance.
Step3.
Stop all the camera's. Download all the different footage to your computer.
In quicktimePro or your video editing program look for that reference point and cut the first part of the video.
Step 4.
You can stitch the videos together in your favorite video editing software like a comparison reel. Now you can look at the same performance from different angles.
Extra step, you can import the video, or if you like, an image sequence of your footage into Maya so when you step trough your keyframes the footage will show the according frame.
Quick and easy. Hope it was helpful.
Cheers!
Joost
