Altered States
Week 20 : Cleaning up the Footage on Nuke/Tracking
Matte painting for the actual background
Above is the matte painting I created for the environment of the final version of this project. I used dark cool tone for the background because I think it complements well with the lanterns that will be added later. While looking at the reference pictures that Cordy had created, I was able to select and eliminates parts that work and parts that doesn’t. For example, the orange-purple gradient doesn’t look as good as it is too similar to the colour of the lantern. I could also see that the vivid blue sky looks nice again the orange lantern as they are complementary colours, however it is too bright causing the scene to look unrealistic and have a more surreal and cartoonist style. Therefore, I chose to have a very dark purple/violet colour as the sky and make the overall look darker to fit the solemn mood of our piece.
Tracking
To test out the animation of the 3D modeled lanterns properly, I needed to camera-track our shot first. Before we were going to have 2 different shots, however after discussion with our peer and tutor, we decided to go with having one shot where the camera is panning up. This is because this shot allows us to see the beautiful motion of the lanterns while having two shots wasn’t necessary according to the plotline and message that we are trying to convey.
Here I labelled the camera track for my teammate to better understand the layout.
I camera tracked the scene many times by using different settings, the first try didn’t come out well and the camera track wasn’t creating much depth. Therefore after attempting to add some geometry, I ended up completely re-tracking the scene with different settings.
Clean up
Above is a work in progress of the clean up of the background. I did this by cleaning up one frame of the video and projecting it back into the 3D environment which had been camera tracked.
Click above for the latest animation test that Cordy had done.
She said,
“After rendering out the lanterns I have noticed some areas I need to improve. For Instance, there is a light out of place, the animation timing, and the quality. I also experimented with adding a different sky to the video using camera tracking in Adobe After Effects, and the Color Range effect to mask out the original sky. “
Advert on the Billboard
Cordy had also created the advertisement video that will be replacing the video on the billboard. The billboard needed to be changed as the content of the original billboard is not suitable with the context and setting of this project which is about a world during a pandemic.