Digital Compositing: Week Eight

I finally got all of my footage this week, so I've been working diligently to matte out all of the footage I took. All in all it came out to about 53 gigabytes worth of high-resolution image sequences. It took a seriously long time to get all of the footage into Final Cut Pro and exported out to the server, but I didn't have any particular trouble with it.

I did have some trials and tribulations when it came to actually reserving the room to take my footage. I was told that every minute of every day was completely booked, save for after 9:30 on Sunday evening; and as one could imagine it was extremely difficult to get all of my actors to show up at such an inconvenient time for an extended period of time-- I owe a lot of friends a favor right now.

I was pretty incredulous to find that the room had been reserved just to store a few cameras in there, while there were people that needed to use it to complete projects, as I discussed with you briefly, Ted.

Luckily, Dave by some happy accident had access to the green screen room, and everyone stayed for a good few hours so I got tons of footage.

I sat down with my roommates and culled through the footage to find the best takes. I got some pretty hilarious footage, and I'm feeling much more optimistic about the final product at this point; I've also found some additional places where I might want to make use of additional cheesy compositing effects such as fake muzzle flash.




One thing I noticed which is going to make my life a little difficult is the presence of the cameras and other low-hanging objects messing up my tighter shots, which the actors occasionally overlap with so I can't use a garbage matte to get rid of that. I will probably have to do some rotoscoping to compensate, as there's no way I'll be able to get in and reshoot any footage at this point.

Below are a few of the mattes that I've pulled so far that came out really nicely, with a still sample from each sequence and then the matted-out video.

Additionally, I've finalized the lighting of my living room scene; I sat down with Chris Redmann and he clued me in on the magic of using directional lights for nice bounce lighting. I'm much happier with how the scene feels now, it feels much more like a warmly-lit room with daylight filtering in through the window.

I've been having some problems with the UVs of my objects, but since I won't have my shaders done until week eleven I'm just going to apply normal image-based and procedural textures to my props. It might be computationally expensive, but I'm just rendering stills, so that should be fine.

Going forward I'm basically just focused on doing a lot of work to further clean up my mattes and compensate for some of the flaws in my shots. Also, tomorrow I have my audio production class so I'll be beginning to work on the backing music for the superhero trailer in that period, and I'll be able to get narration voice work done as well.

UPDATE:

Behold! Hilarious title cards, done in Flash with my tablet by tracing over stills of Dave and Mike posing and smiling goofily at the camera. I was originally going to just use their live-action photos and be done with it, but I decided cartoonizing them would be more faithful of an homage.