Cartooner

For the fourth section of the project I used BCC’s Film Damage filter. It allows you to add scratches, grain particles, hair or fibers, and dirt, dust, or water spots. It also allows you to simulate camera shake and a flickering image. The color effects were the result of using the Difference mode; a mathematical operation that combines pixels on one layer of a composition with the layer behind it. In this composition I had a royal blue solid behind the layer with the keyed hand. The Difference mode I applied to the hand layer used the luminance values of the two layers and interpolated new values based on the difference.

On this footage, I started with BCC Linear Color Key and then used Keylight to remove edges I couldn’t get out with the first key. This slowed down rendering time considerably and as there were two shots; one of the front view of the mudra and one of the back view I needed to precompose. I rendered the front and back views separately with their alpha channels intact and started a new composition using these files. The shadows were also created from these files so I had four video clips in all used in this comp.

The twirl on the back drop was made by the BCC Twirl filter. It has a motion tracker which should animate the motion by following the movement of the arm but I used the "twirl center" parameter on the filter and manually generated key frames to follow the movement of the hand for a tidier motion. The motion tracker generated scads of key frames – far more than were needed. The BCC Glow Alpha Edges filter added a soft white glow to the masked arm that improved it’s compatibility with the back drop behind it.

I used this filter to apply a glow with a gradient attached to it to the alpha channel from the keyed hand. As with all Boris Filters – this filter could be used in many ways. For instance, the gradient colors, the thickness or brightness of the glow and many other parameters could all be animated over time. In this clip I chose to have the outline of the hand movement from the original video to be the only changing parameter.

The blue screen I used was a rack 15′ by 20′ that sported a chroma key blue cloth curtain. I would probably try a green screen for the next project. The blue often shifted to grey when automatic focus had to be used on the camera and that made keying really difficult. I used Keylight, a keying filter that comes with the Pro version of Adobe After Effects to do the keying at first. More about this in another post. I also used Boris Continuum Complete (BCC) Linear Color Key extensively. In the end I think I got consistently better results from BCCs filter.