The better the original shoot the better the key. Always check your key by going to composition>Background color and choosing a nice bright color, in this case I used blue. The black default is very deceptive so you'll often think you have a great key when you don't. In this case after turning the background blue and going back to final result I decide to shrink the matte a little bit to get rid on an outline.
I used Screen Grow/Shrink and put a '-3.4' to take away most of the outline. You might be wondering why the face is so squished. That is because the Sony HDV format uses 1440x1080 pixels and a pixel format of non-square (1.33:1) to make a final picture of 1980x1080 square pixels. (I know, it gives me a headache too.) What I usually do is to make a new compostion of 1920x1080 square pixels and drag everything into it, sometimes adjusting the horizontal scale to fit. The newer versions of After Effects and Photoshop do some of this automatically, which can be both helpful or confusing. In any event, you want to be able to see a correctly proportioned face, and a perfect circle and a square graphic instead of a rectangle or an eplise.
Step Three — Compositing
The next step is to find background footage. After dinner one night, I made my wife drive while I shot background plates of our neighborhood. I used my consumer HDV camera mounted on a tripod that I held tightly in the back seat pointed out the side window. I tried to keep the lower part of the window in frame so I had the car door as a reference to track. I realized I didn't have any markers to track so I improvised one out of a piece of chewing gum stuck to the door in the camera frame. Since our project takes place in the 1950s we had to find areas where the houses were the proper age and there were no modern cars. This was actually easier than I expected it to be since I only needed short clips. We found an old bridge for the shot we used and even though we had plenty of footage with no modern cars in it, I selected one with a modern car coming from the other direction. I wanted to see if there was any way to get rid of the modern car, as It was a problem that would probably come up.
On an earlier shooting day we had three period cars doing a drive by in front of the location we were using. It was a wonderful small town of Union Mills, Maryland and except for the modern cars driving past and parked along parts of the street, it was a perfect little 50s town. We got some shots of the three 50s cars driving up and down the street and I also took some stills of the cars including a side shot of a Hudson and some interior shots.
