Our most complex cleanup task involved a single master shot of a 1950’s theater we’d found. However, it had a variety of small issues that would need to be cleaned up in post. To fix all the issues would involved a combination of rotoscoping, patch plates, and multiple sets of masks and adjustment layers.
The first issue was the fact that we couldn’t open up the actual display cases to put posters in them during the shoot, so we would have to put at least one poster in post. (It turned out to be impossible to put in a second poster due to the fact that there is nearly constant action right in front of it for too much of the film.) The second issue was that there was a decidedly modern security camera that needed to be removed in post. The final pre-known issue was that we could only get one vintage car for the short to park in front of the theater and this car had to be used later in the film. To make it look like a different car, we’d need to change the color, while retaining the reflections in post.
We tried to make things as simple on ourselves during production, looking for things the camera might catch. Cinematographer Nathan Eckelbarger cleverly helped us “remove” a modern sign by spray painting it black with black hair spray. The hair spray washes off in the first rain, but it makes it look as though you’re looking at the back of the sign when you shoot it!
However, there are always a few things that get missed. One of the things that was overlooked was a bright orange extension cord that some of the actors step over in the shot. The other thing that was missed was the fact that one of our gaffers was standing inside the windows of the car with a bounce card that was clearly visible.
The image below and the video clip shows how the clip originally looked and how it looked after we worked on it. After that, I'll explain the steps we took!
Adding the Poster:
Director Nick Denney designed a 50's-style film poster that
was a tongue-in-cheek take on "Roman Holiday."
We added it in using the Corner Pin option in AE, so that
we could skew it to the poster frame that was there. We
then set it to 25% opacity and put it on “Screen”
transfer mode, so that it would appear to be behind the
plexiglass of the poster frame.
After that came the less fun part of the process: rotoscoping! Essentially this involves using the pen tool to select portions of the frame with a colored border called a ‘mask.’ This mask can be used for a variety of things, but, most commonly, it’s used to “Add” footage or “Subtract” footage. So that our actors could run across the poster, we added a subtraction mask around their forms. After turning on the keyframe mode, we would go about ten frames into the future and adjust the mask, then ten more frames and re-adjust the mask. Once you’ve moved all the way through the movement that obscures whatever object you’re masking, you play through the clip. Then you go back through it again, this time every five frames and readjust the mask. Slowly but surely you get a motion mask that’s fairly believable. Since there was a lot of movement, we had to add feather to the mask so that part of the background bleeds into the obscuring character’s movement. In the end, we were able to get shots that we were fairly happy with.
