Introduction

Alden Peters is a director, YouTuber, and Blender expert. He created a fictional universe called ‘Friends of Sophia’, focusing on relationships formed under a repressive future world, and even made a 25-minute short film set in this future.

The film was shot on greenscreen with locked-off cameras, and took him nearly 2 years to complete! This experience made him put off his plans for a feature project . . . until he discovered Jetset.

Alden Discovers Jetset

Alden tried out the free version of Jetset and created this video with Blender!

Alden and Lightcraft then worked together to create a series of short segments set in his ‘Friends of Sophia’ universe.

Episode 1: “The Meeting”

Episode 1 showed the initial meeting of the titular characters, and let Alden experiment with ambitious camera moves without having to manually track the shots:

In his second installment (featured video above), Alden uses a ‘pre-shoot’ and ‘pre-edit’ technique to visually block out all the shots of his production in his living room with Jetset, before he ever steps foot on a production stage!

We think this is an absolutely pivotal part of pre-production planning. Storyboards don’t handle time, space, and motion, and it’s hard to get a feel for how real camera blocking will ‘feel’ until you’re actually watching it.

Episode 2: “The Computer”

Episode 2 of shows the potential of shooting the entire project on Jetset before principal photography.

Since Jetset tracks 1:1 in real world scale, the DP (in this case Alden) could load in the scene along with the greenscreen stage size, and test shoot every shot for both practical production considerations, and (most important!) how it works in the edit.

He was able iterate this multiple times in a very short period of time, as there is almost nothing to set up — shot tests happen in the living room instead of on an expensive sound stage.

The result is so clear — look at the fluid motion and blocking of the camera and the actors. It’s hard to realize that one of them wasn’t there on the set!

Episode 3: “The Lookout”

In Episode 3, Alden gets ambitious with camera moves, following the titular duo as they ascend a tower to achieve a quiet but spectacular view in the heights.

He then walks us through his entire workflow from start to finish, including how he rapidly animates Bytes, creates a sci-fi city, and finally finishes compositing the shots together.

Episode 4: “The Fight”

In this episode, Alden uses technical leaps to achieve storytelling moments. He’s using a second tracked Jetset iPhone to locate the head of Bytes as he moves through the scene, so that B.J. (the actor playing Tidbits) can see where and when Bytes is moving.

The go-to technique for years on set has been a tennis ball on a stick, but then someone has to object track that tennis ball through 3D space, which usually requires 2 interlocking witness cameras, or a full mocap system — a huge pain.

When shooting virtual production Jetset-style, the 3D tracking is achieved by an iPhone on a stick! Since both Jetset devices are locked to the same coordinate system, and are on the same timecode, the data all lines up in 3D, making it easy for Alden to put the shots together.

This episode also pioneers the use of Gaussian splats for the real time virtual background; these allow the fully rendered interior of the scene from Blender to be compressed to run real time inside the iPhone on Jetset!

Episode 5: “The Ex”

Episode 5 introduces us to Bytes’ ‘Ex’, dives into the clever approaches Alden used to bring this fast-moving 3D character into the world, and finishes with a quick trip through sub-pixel tracking refinement.

The same ‘iPhone on a Stick’ method is used to track the fast-moving ‘Ex’ character as it buzzes and zips through the scene. Alden goes into more detail on how the data comes into Blender, and shows the near- perfect alignment between where the ‘Ex’ iPhone appears in the cine footage, and where the 3D position tracking lines up.

This is again all done without motion capture or external witness cameras. For projects working with animated CG characters, especially fast-moving ones that would be hard to keep track of in a scene, this can be another game-changer.

Alden finishes with a quick trip through the automated tracking refinement pipeline with SynthEyes. Most shots won’t need this, but for the shots that do it can be an absolutely incredible time saver.