Course Work



Project 4 Team Compositing
Falling Professor
MAIN
Title Sequence Falling Professor Moving Sound Booth Still Sound Booth
Moving Studio Shot Jim Skeleton Appalachian Dancer & Kool Aid Man Dancing Shoes


This shot was handled by Kevin.
This shot consisted of a video of Dan gesturing while lying stationary composited with a shot of a window of Dr. Geist's office to create the illusion that Dan was falling.

This was done by first keying and rotoing the footage of Dan. A rough chroma key was done on the video. The video was then exported as an image sequence and then imported back into Shake. A roto shape was applied to this new source video to clean up artifacts left behind by the key.

The video of Dan was then color corrected. Importing this video as an image sequence caused it to become premultiplied, so the MDiv and MMlut nodes were applied to the tree before and after the color correction, respectively.

The color corrected output of Dan was then lined up over the video of the window. Move3D and Move2D nodes were then used to manually simulate Dan falling. A blur node was added to embellish the effect.

In order for Dan to really look like he was in the shot, he had to be sandwiched behind the window of the office and in front of the trees and buildings in the background. Roto shapes were used to do this.

A roto shape consisting of four squares that matched the four panes of the window was made. Instead of keyframing the shape manually, it was tracked to match the movement of the camera. This was done with a single point MatchMove using "Inside" instead of "Over".

This output was plugged into the Mask channel of a copy of the source video creating a plate of just the background while accounting for the space occupied by the window (it was basically the background with a black cross over it where the window should be)

Another layer was created using the exact same process applied to the inverse of the original roto. This created a plate of the foreground with a blank background.

These three layers (foreground, Dan, background) were layered together to make the final composite.