midterm Production log

Overall

The midterm project I created was aimed to show the green screen ability to match 3D scene and overlay live action inside it. The project I had in mind was to have a volcano crater with a magma pit. The scene depicts me walking over to the edge of the pit and peeking over to the lava. This simulates one of the scenes in The Lord of the Rings trilogy where the protagonist Frodo destroys the ring.

Production

My strategy was to create the scene really exemplifying lighting. I wanted to show the dynamic lighting in which the moon light blue glow and the lava yellog glow mix together. Although I was able to do this in the 3D scene, I was unable to do this in the live action part. Even though this was my first official green screen project, i believed that the lighting was not overall bad, however it should be noted that it was not great either. My strategy going in to the project was to do as best as I can in preproduction and production stage. By doing this, post production would have been easier. Of course things rarely work out the way one wants.

From the beginning, I put a lot of value in planning. This is why the storyboard part really became an important asset to me as I followed that in the my cinematography. I also decided to create the 3D scene first, rightfully so, as I needed to know the timing of the shots. The trick with compositing live action and 3D is getting the timing right during the interaction. For instance: if wanted to throw an animated ball my hand and arm motions must match the speed of which the ball is moving as I throw it. This is essential to create realistic effect. Therefore by rendering out the 3D footage first I was able to figure out how long each shot must be to synchronized with the animated background.

After finishing the background movie I shot the live action footage.  Because of limited green screen space I planned the shots to be at 90 degrees from the camera. In other words it was not possible for me to have any diagonal shots at all. This actually turned out to be a good idea as I shot from two angles, the back and the side, making it easy to composite. The backshot was a bit tricky to create. Originally I intended to have the camera placed high above me at an angle facing my back. This shot was supposed to have me coming in from out of view, walking into view. However since I worked on the project myself I could not place the camera higher than what my tripod allowed. What resulted was a shot fairly down to eye level, limiting the effect of moving in depth away from the camera. This was later solved in post production. The second shot was a closeup side view. Fairly simple to make in live action and straightforward.

Post Production

Post production was where the bulk of my work was done. The first order of business was to key out the green screen background. To do this I used the keylight effect in AE and set the tolerance up a little (because the green screen was not perfectly stable in that there were highlights and shadows). The second stage was to use the alpha and "purify" the key to make sure my figure was pure white and the green screen was pure back; this also included bluring the edges a little bit scale the mask. The third stage was color correction. I color corrected the live action footage in order to make myself fit with the background. I suppressed the blue and increased the red and green to make yellow. I also darkened the footage a bit as well. The final stage was to animate the footage so that it appears to come from the bottom leading the middle of the screen. Scaling down for the depth effect was also necessary.

The second shot, the side shot was done exactly like the first back shot with the exception of animation. If you look closely I programmed the 3D camera in the 3D scene to zoom in for this shot so that it looks convincing as a closeup. This was a small effect I was particular proud of. The main aspect of shot was the glow. Originally I wanted to have the light shining on my face as I peered into the lava pit. Because I had no lights available (due to the fact that I could not enter the lighting room) I resorted to mimick the effect in AE. This was a lot harder and took a lot longer than I thought. After several failed attempts to alter the color hues using masks I could not get a realistic looking effect until I came accross the glow. The glow effect was most favorable and was chosen for this shot. My plan for the glow was to have it stationed in a spot and have me "lean" under it. This gives the effect of directional light setting my face aglow. The first implementation was a bit tricky. I could not have the glow affect my face without also affecting the background. To prevent this unwanted artifact I duplicated the live action layer and masked out one of them so that the glow will cover the mask and not my entire body (without the mask, the glow affects the entire layer, thus I had to mask the live action layer so that the glow can only affect a small portion of my face. Then the original live action layer will be visible because of the mask on the overlayed layer). This gave the effect of glowing only one part of my body.
Finally the final shot was not filmed due to lack of time.

What worked

-green screen
-animation
-timing,
color correction
-Glow

What didnt work

-lighting
-camera angle

Final thoughts

I throuhoutly enjoyed the project. I had been eager to do a green screen project for some time now. I believe that it came out quite well considering I had never done this before, I had mostly my imagination to work with. Despite the lighting and camera challenges, I improvised and overcame them quite nicely. I learned how powerful compositing programs like AE and Combustion really are because I was able to do so much with such simple shots. I really liked how the glow came out in the second shot, but mainly how well the footages were timed really impressed me; this made my project believable by a generous stretch of the imagination. I also liked how well the compositing came out although I could not acheive the blue and yellow light mixture i wanted (due to lack of equipment); the green screen really held its own for being peices of crumbled up green paper. I am happy how this project rendered out overall and look forward to my next one.

3D composite

Here is a 3D video composite made in combustion where i used the 3D elements to make a video composite inside another video

For this one I actually ended up using all 3D elements with no live action. Everything seen in the following image was created in combustion with the exception of the actual video you see (done in another 3D program) I used various operators in the stylize section as well as key frame animation for movement

Midterm Proposal

for my midterm project i wanted to recreate the volcano scene of Lord of the Ring where I am walking inside of a lava pit of a volcano. The sequence is short and just illustrates putting live action into a 3D environment.