Help for technique to creating vacuum cleaner suction manipulations.

[gbfoto]

Hi All,

I hope you can help with my request; I am looking at having to create suction manipulations for a project for my photography degree major project and am a bit lost in how to achieve it in a realistic way. The project will be a mock advertising campaign for a vacuum cleaner. There are two parts to the project:

1. Creating a suction effect where the floor is being sucked into the vacuum cleaner. Rather than it being a rug it would need to be solid floor like a wooden floor of the street for example.

2. Two people having a battle/fight using the vacuum cleaners as weapons which are sucking in their opponents body parts (such as head, arm, leg foot etc.)

I have attached two images I have found which are the closest I have found. The end result has to be very photo-realistic for it to work.



Any suggestions upon how to create these would be much appreciated and I will be so grateful before I begin banging my head against the wall. I am experienced in using Photoshop and compositing/manipulating images.

Many thanks in Advance

Graham

 

[IamSam]

Hey Graham, for these type of effects you just use standard compositing techniques with layering. The body parts being sucked into the vacuum will just need to be coped and manipulated with one or all of the transformation tools, mostly the liquify filter and maybe Puppet warp. You may need some Clone Stamp work to hide the body parts on the underlying layer.

The floor being sucked into a vacuum will require much more work. Finding or creating the floor that's being sucked up may be a challenge, especially in matching the perspective of the floor. You may need some drawing skills with the Brush Tool and some displacement mapping to add the floor texture to the wrinkled up floor.

You could also stage the images if you take your own reference photos. This would be the easiest way for the floor manip.

 

[gbfoto]

Thanks IamSam,

Thanks for the suggestions, they are great. I had played around with the puppet warp and the liquify filters indepentantly to try and create the effect but was struggling with the realism aspect. Combining the two sounds like a potential plan.

For the floor being sucked in into the vacuum cleaner, I know this is a lot of work! I am primarily a photographer first so I always take reference photos and construct the photographs I need for manipulations by breaking the overall concept down into the elements required. Normally to deal with perspective issues I would shoot the separate images with a tripod and keep the height and camera angle exactly the same for all of the elements. Perhaps the way to go on this is to get a large sheet of lightweight material and actually suck it into the vacuum cleaner and then with a reference photo of the floor use displacement mapping to combine the two?

 

[IamSam]

Perhaps the way to go on this is to get a large sheet of lightweight material and actually suck it into the vacuum cleaner and then with a reference photo of the floor use displacement mapping to combine the two?

This is what I was thinking of, maybe a large drop cloth or tarp. You don't really have to suck it up with a vacuum, just stage it so it looks as if it were being sucked up.