Behind the Scenes

The Cloak: How We Recreated the Predator's Cloak
By now, I'm willing to bet that you've read the tutorial on how to make your very own Predator vision using such common household materials like Adobe Photoshop 7 and QuickTime Pro. Well, it's time to take things to the next level. What follows below is a tutorial for making your own invisible predator! Whether you're looking to have an invisible Predator as a pet, or a nanny to watch over your children while you're at work, this is the only place you'll find out how! These are the very same steps we used for creating our invisible Predator you see in our two Fan Films, Predator: Dark Jungle and the upcoming Predator: Hunter's Match. This is your chance to learn from the Predator fan film pros just how to make an invisible Predator, follow along, if you feel so inclined!

Filming the Background
There are two things you'll need to begin. The first is a video shoot of the scene where your invisible Predator is supposed to be a part of. When you film these, try to keep objects out of the foreground so there is nothing between the camera and the location where you'll be putting your Predator - since you're going to be placing your Predator on top of this scene, having anything between him and the camera would defeat the illusion of him being part of the scene. When you film this, lock down your camera to a tripod, hit record, and don't move the camera while it's recording. If the camera moves, you would have to make your invisible Predator follow the motion of the camera perfectly in order for the illusion to work - a very difficult process! Just locking the camera down and leaving it be will make this process much easier. To get you started, I've included a background I filmed which you can use for this tutorial. I am only supplying one frame however, not the entire clip. You can download the image here.

Filming the Predator
The second step to creating your invisible Predator is getting a source for the Predator himself. The easiest way to do this is to film someone in the Predator costume acting out what your want your Predator to do. Your only other choice would be to animate your Predator by drawing him frame by frame, like making a cartoon, which would be a very daunting task. When you film your Predator, you want to make it easy for Photoshop's magic wand tool to pick out the Predator against the background because it'll save you the huge task of manually cutting him out with the lasso tool. If you have access to a green screen, that is your answer. If you do not have access to a green screen, then allow me to present the poor man's green screen.

The Poor Man's Green Screen
You'll need to film your invisible Predator at night. Hang a sheet in a large doorway between two large rooms. Be sure to keep the sheet pulled tight to avoid as many wrinkles as possible. Place your camera and your Predator in the dark room, and light up the room on the opposing side of the sheet. What you've essentially done is created a sharp silhouette of your predator, making his edge easy for Photoshop to detect. Since the details of the Predator himself are not needed, this works perfectly. All we need is the outline of him to create an invisible Predator. It's very important to line your predator up in direction and size to the scene you're going to be placing him into that you filmed earlier. Again, don't move the camera! Also be sure to contain your Predator within the light. Whatever parts don't fit in the light will be cut off later on. In this tutorial, his legs were not needed, so it worked out fine. If your particular scene calls for a full body, invisible Predator, you'll need to get into a green screen room, or enjoy the tedious work of manually cutting out your predator from a well lit video clip. I've included a Predator we filmed for you to use for this tutorial. You can download it here.

Piecing them Together
So you've got your background and your predator filmed. What you'll need to do now is get those video clips into your computer, and break them down into image sequences. A one second clip will become thirty images, so you're probably not going to want to do a clip longer than five seconds. You can use QuickTime Pro to break down and put together image sequences. Your video editing software may also already have this capability. For this tutorial though, you can simply use the one supplied background and predator image you downloaded earlier.

Open up your background image and your Predator image in Adobe Photoshop, and create a new Document (the same size as your video frames). Paste the Background into the new document and name the layer "Background". In your Predator image document, try using the magic wand to select the Predator; when you do this, you'll notice that the black walls surrounding the light source are also selected. You can quickly deselect the walls with the rectangular Lasso tool by holding down the option key and dragging over the areas you want to deselect. If your Predator doesn't select with a nice hard edge, try adjusting the levels of the Predator image or blurring it slightly to get rid of some jaggy edges and image noise. It's worth noting that the better a camera you have, the nicer an edge your Predator is going to have. At the least, you should have a DV camera of some sort. Besides being highly superior in image quality and much easier to use with a computer, there's just no sense in spending hours and hours of time creating special effects for video that was filmed on VHS. No matter how much time you spend on it, the video's still going to look muddy and lifeless[end rant]. Finally, once you have your Predator isolated and selected, copy and paste him into the new document you created, placing him above the "backround" layer and naming him "Predator". you can now close both the background image and the predator image since they are both pasted into a new document, from which you'll be working for the rest of this process.

So you've got your background and your black Predator sitting on top the trees. Now, you'll need to place your Predator where you want him. If you're going to be doing video of this, you'll need to somehow keep track of how far you move and rotate him, otherwise your Predator will jerk around from frame to frame, looking as if he's drank too much coffee. Once you've got your Predator in place, bring up the Hue/Saturation box under Image/Adjustments menu and drop his lightness all the way down, so he is truly 100% black. You'll want the Predator's arm to look as if it's behind the tree. The easiest way to do this is to copy that part of the tree branch to a new layer and move it up in front of everything else. Name it "Log". Things are starting to come together now, eh?

Making him Disappear
It's time to make your Predator look clear and gel-like as he does in the real movies. Duplicate your "Predator" layer and name the duplicate "Predator Outlines". Turn your "Predator" layer off using the eye icon beside the layer. Select the Predator on the "Predator Outlines" layer and contract the selection by 10 pixels by going to the Select/Modify/Contract menu. Delete this part of the Predator, thus leaving a 10 pixel outline of your black Predator. With your selection still made, Expand your selection by 7 pixels by going to the Select/Modify/Expand menu. Choose "Fragment" from the Filter/Pixelate Menu, and repeat the Fragment seven more times (note that the last filter you used is listed at the top of the Filters menu, thus saving you time). Deselect your Predator, and invert the layer so the black becomes white. Set the layer transparency to "overlay" from the Layers Pallet. Blur the edges of your invisible Predator by reloading the outline of the "Predator" layer, creating a Border of 5 pixels from the Select/Modify/Border menu and then giving that selection a Gaussian Blur of 1. If your Predator doesn't stand out enough for you, Duplicate your "Predator Outlines" layer so there are two stacked on top of eachother. For my final image, I had two "Predator Outlines" layers, with the top one having a 50% opacity.

The Final Touches
Lastly, duplicate your Background layer and name it "Sphere Background". Reload the Predator outline again by selecting your "Predator". Feather the edge by about 5 with the Select/Feather Menu. Then, choose Filters/Spherize and use an amount of about 75% - be sure this is on your "Sphere Background" layer. With your selection still active, move the Hue slightly into the blue with the Image/Adjustments/Hue & Saturation Menu. Deselect your Predator, and that's it! Click Here to see what your final product should look like!

You're Insane
Congratulations. You have completed 1/30th of a second of video. Only 179 more to go to make 6 seonds! Ok, so you're probably wondering if there's an easier way to do this. Well, Not Really. However, If you have a green screen and If the light is right, it will take but one click with the magic wand in Photoshop to seperate Predator from the background, which saves some time. Second, you can record every step after placing the Predator as an "Action" in Photoshop, everything from then on will be automated To the right is an image of what your layers pallette should look like if you follow our steps. If you know of a better way to do this, let us know! Until then, this is how SBOOB makes their invisible Predators. If you try these steps, we'd be curious to see your results. Teh Ned.