I’ve already done the character’s modeling work, and also make the texture and shader for them in Maya Arnold. So this week my collaborators will give me the footage that I could continuely do the compositting work.
Here I would use one of the video compositions to illustrate my method, as the rest of the footage uses this same workflow.
So I drap all the footage into After Effects, and create one composition. Cause I’ve already told Guanze, in compositting work which kind of path I need for example ID, emissive if have, Z depth etc. So I put one original footage at the bottom, then duplicate it and give it a extractor.
I could extract different paths I need with this step. For example I extract the emissive path, in this scene the light from the flashlight is the only source of emissive. So I wanna its color become more cold this can have a strong contrast with the eyes of the monster behind the crimson color. I edit the curves and increased Blue content in RGB. The same method I uesd to the human. Cause the light is pretty dark in a cave, so audience can’t see where the human is, I especialy increase the edge light of the figure by the method I told before to allow the audience to enhance the perception of this scene between the characters standing.
For the monster’s eye, in the very first time I extract the ID path, and use color key to extract eye’s position. After that I added another original layer under it and set it as ‘Alpha Inverted Matte’. So that I can adjust only for this area. I use a new plug-in which is ‘real gow’ it could bring a perfect glow effect. So I added the glow effect when the eyes are open, and key some animation to make its glow effect look flickering, which makes the whole picture become more vivid.
Finally I add 2 more adjust layer, one for edit the whole gamma some of our footage’s gamma isn’t well, another one for edit color and filters. Editing gamma is simple, the gamma value that best suits your picture is the best. There is no trick to it, it is entirely based on your picture. For the editting color I use a plug-in ‘Looks’ it would be very fast to adjust a lot of desired effects, even the focal length and so on can be adjusted very convenient. In this project, since we are a Cthulhu project, I want the frames to be in a blue-purple tone, so I spend a lot of time to adjust it.
Finally output the whole footage the compositting work is done. I basically used this method to composite all the shots I needed, and it wasn’t as much trouble as I thought it would be, because as soon as the first one was done, the later ones just needed a few simple adjustments.