Case study: Film

Short film ”Copy Shop”
The short film "Copy Shop" tells the story of a man who works in a copy shop and copies himself until he fills the whole world. "Copy Shop" has won 35 international prizes and was nominated for the Oscar®.

Tasks:
"Stylistically, the film Copy Shop should itself look like a moving photocopy." (Virgil Widrich, the film’s director and producer). To achieve the extraordinarily complex animation (the actor Johannes Silberschneider, who plays the leading role, appears in as many as 280 roles simultaneously) a technique had to be found which was relatively inexpensive.

Solution:
"Copy Shop" was first shot on digital video, the actor playing each role one after the other. For sequences with a moving camera a specially constructed "motion control camera" was used to enable the filming of several takes with the same camera movement. In the next phase these shots were combined using a compositing program and the individual figures separated by moving masks. Digital matte paintings magnified the movie set so it looked like an entire town. The copying effect was achieved by printing out all 18,000 frames, making photocopies of each one and filming them with a 35 mm camera.
"Copy Shop" combines knowledge of film (story board, set design, motion control, film editing) with multimedia know-how (compositing, image alienation, 3D animation).

Link to the project: Copy Shop


Copy Shop trailer:

• Quick Time (1,59 MB)
  
• Media Player (1,44 MB)
  
• Realplayer (1,52 MB)

Further selected projects in this field:

• Cinema film “Heller als der Mond” (“Brighter than the Moon”)
  
• Innovative film technique “ tx-transform”