Chroma Keying & The Art Of Psychedelic Panda Vision

FOOTAGE: The video attached to this section shows briefly the processes needed to prepare a finished shot from my video. I started with a clip of raw footage, with the sound isolated; in this case a clip of my newsreader stood against a somewhat Blue Peter greenscreen (It is actually the side panel of my garden shed, skillfully painted by my dear old man.) The greenscreen is then keyed out in the compositing package (in this case AfterEffects) using the colour key tool, to help neaten edges on the keying matte chokers with geometric softness are applied. To aid in seeing if any green remains a strong backplate colour is underlaid (I went for a rather fetching red). This footage is now ready to be placed onto it's backing plate, which as the name suggests will be a separate layer behind the footage

BACKPLATE: For the backplate I started with a live-action photograph, to help place my footage and scale it correctly, in this case I took a photo of the field area outside the animation department and the rather unsightly and monolithic Travelodge that selfishly encroaches on the lincoln skyline. To this I then added a cloud map, buildings and signage to make the area feel in keeping with the other locations in the film. For instance the PPL Heart logo can be seen on the side of the factory chimneys and the pink sky helped to match the plate to the colour scheme of the piece.

ANIMATION: The next element to go in was my animation. This was modeled and animated in 3D package Maya. To ensure that the perspective and scaling was identical to my live action and backplates I export a still from the edited footage and mapped this to a camera within Maya, all animation was then done working from that specific viewpoint. The animation was then rendered out without any other details and placed into the scene, and masking layers were applied to cover any spots where the character needed to disappear behind another layer (in this case the buildings) finally and ambient occlusion pass was layered over the animation to help make the piece feel as solid and real as possible.

FINISHING TOUCHES: The final element in the compositing process was to add any small items which would really bring the piece together and make it feel like a genuine news report. In this case a camera shake was added, through the use of wiggle presets and frame-by-frame keying to make the locked off shot feel more natural. A layer of grain was added over this to give the impression that this was a rushed news report coming in hot off the press so to speak. To further add to the news report element banners of further news updates and the live tag were added.