Tuesday 13/10/20 - VFX Part 2

Now came adding the rendered animation into my footage, this would prove difficult as the footage I had recorded was very shakey due to the strong winds and lack of a gimbal to stablize it. First thing I did was open the clip up in premiere pro and try to find some tutorials online to help make the footage more stable.

I ended up using this video but it wasn't perfect, it ended up only slightly stablizing my footage. However, it was still better than the original which made my job slightly easier.

Next problem was the lack of experience using chroma key in premiere pro. Once again I found a tutorial online explaining the process behind it. Unfortunately most were catered towards people wanting to remove backgrounds and not erasing something in the foreground.

I had to experiment with the different settings to get the best looking chroma key with the footage I had, it wasn't perfect but it made for a good first attempt. Next I had to use my footage of the water without the subject as a background, after stabilizing this footage I had to keyframe it so it stayed alligned with the other shot. I also had to adjust exposure and brightness to help make the blend slightly more natural.

Now I was able to add the render, to start off I simply keyframed it in the right position and angle for each frame of the video, this wasn't too difficult due to the low framerate and footage being pretty short. What came next was more difficult.

The final part was actually removing most of the arm aside from the hand, for this I simply added a mask over the section I wanted cut out. For each frame I adjusted the shape so it would appear as if the cybernetic arm actually was underneath the jacket and not overlayed ontop of the footage. This was very iffy especially at angles where you would normally be able to see inside the sleeve. This was an issue I had to ignore due to the lack of time, budget and experience to chroma key that well.

Here is the finished animation for the short film: