Special FX - CCTV Style Shot

Within our opening sequence our bad guy is watching a range of monitors that is showing the CCTV footage of our hero and nerd going about their every day life's. To achieve the CCTV camera style shots we are going to place the camera high up and capture high angled shots, as if they where point of view shots from a CCTV camera on a roof or ceiling of a building. A CCTV camera tends to track movement by panning left to right, or tilting up or down in a smooth movement. We can simply use the tripod head to achieve this type of camera movement.

We will also need to do some colour correction using Final Cut when we are editing the CCTV footage. Colour correction includes turning the footage to a light shade of green or blue, changing the contrast and changing the saturation levels. The quality of the footage will need to be dropped, to achieve the look of a CCTV camera, otherwise the footage will look high quality like the previous shots. Titles such as 'cam 1' and counting numbers, '00:00:02:01' can be used to sell the special effect even more. We can also add title credits within the titles of the CCTV footage, such as 'Directed by...' or 'Cinematography by...'.

The choice of having a CCTV camera style shot in our opening sequence just adds to the effect of having a children's spy film, this is because a CCTV camera is seen as being technical and gadgety.

The video below shows and example of turning HD video into a CCTV style piece of footage. It includes titles and colour correction.

Update - 20/10/2011 -

For the second day of the production of our children's opening, we started to film the start of the 'bad-guy' footage which we will finish on the 21/10/2011. The bad guy is introduced in the opening sequence as a man watching CCTV footage of our 'Hero', 'Ajax Thompson' walking to his lesson at 'Spy School'. The following footage is the actual footage that we shot on day one of production, 18/10/2011, and I edited it to look like CCTV footage with the methods stated in the paragraphs above. I used 'Sony Vegas Movie Studio' to edit, and added simple colour blocks and lowered the transparency levels to achieve the green CCTV look, and added a 'TV Simulation' special effect to achieve the fuzzy look .