Compositing!

Now were finally at the stage which this project is all about! The compositing!

First things first, the footage of us had to made into high quality image-sequences for Toxik to recognize them. Toxik is of course the amazing software we are doing the work with.

The first thing we did was keying.
Since all our footage was of us on greenscreen, we just had to go through them one by one and key out the green, so that in the next step we could just add the needed background and then add all the fun effects and color corrections etc...

Sometimes there wwere clips that was tricky to get all the green out of. So we had to rotoscope masks to remove the remaining stuff.
That was probably the one thing that has taken the longest time to do on this project. but once you know how to do it, you just put some headphones on and let your hands do the work almost without thinking about it.

The next bit is by far the most fun one.
This is where we had to make the different layers of each clip look like the same.
There are alot of different things that might be needed for those layers to look right.

We mostly did it in this order:

2d transform - to place the clips around in the frame to make the shot we want.
Time offset - to make the clip start and/or end at the right time.
Color correction - to adjust contrast and color value.
Add grain - to make computer perfect images seem like they have been filmed with the same videocamera as the real life footage.
Blur - to simulate a shift of focus by blurring different layers.

Now all the clips are finished and we are really happy with the results! It honestly eceeded my expectations. We have managed to make something that we would be impressed to watch two months ago.
The thing i am most satisfied with, is the fact that we successfully merged a 3d object onto real life footage. I consider this a very powerful skill to have experience in. Because essentially anyone could do it, but having tried it, like we have now, definately builds an advantage for whenever we do this for real!