DARKER COLORS | A short Film by Seth Worley
I got the chance to do roto work on 6 shots on a Red Giant film with Seth Worley! Check out the film below!
Darker Colors (2020)
Role: VFX Artist/Roto Team
Link: https://www.redgiant.com/darker-colors/
I was scrolling through Twitter and Seth tweeted out that he needed some people to help roto some shots on the film. So I tweeted at him with my reel and he let me join the team! The film premiered on February 27th and it was so much fun watching it screen online live with everyone!
Here is some of the work I did on the film in a fun lil’ roto reel I cooked up with 3 of the 6 shots I worked on!
Check out the behind the scenes of the movie!
What is ROTOSCOPING?
For those who do not know what rotoscoping is!
Programs used: After Effects + Mocha
Rotoscoping is the process of cutting out an object through drawing and animating masks so then you can isolate that object and layer objects behind it! In Visual Effects/CGI you will often be adding in elements into a scene. So in order for those objects to feel like they belong in that world you have to make it feel like it interacts with the scene.
“The more types of interactions between your CG objects and your real-life objects in the scene, the more an audience will believe that your CG is real!”
One of the ways to create interactions is through Rotoscoping! Say you are adding back in the coffee cup into a Game of Thrones episode. If you didn’t know, there was once an coffee cup accidentally left on the table during one of the scenes of the final season episodes.
The infamous coffee cup in Game of Thrones. Season 8, Episode 4. It has since been removed and reuploaded.
Anyways, we are adding in a coffee cup into the scene and a character in the shot walks in front of the coffee cup. So when that character walks in front of the object we shouldn’t see that coffee cup! So we have to duplicate the footage, create a mask out of the top layer and cut out that character who walked in front of the cup frame by frame. Then put our coffee cup in between the base layer of footage and the character isolated! So now our cup will interact, in a small way, with the scene! We would have to still 3d track, match focus, motion blur, reflections, color, and lighting/shadows. But at least we got one down!
Layer Setup:
Character Layer (w/ Masked the character walking in front of the Cup)
Coffee Cup (Either a 3d model or an photo we popped in)
Original Footage
Roto can get pretty time consuming if the object you have to mask is:
Active/Organic forms (Hands, Hair, Cloth…)
Reflected or refracted in mirrors/other objects/water
Fast moving/Out of Focus (you have to play with feathering the mask to get it right!)
Here’s Video Copilot’s classic tutorial on using masks in After Effects for the new to VFX people out there! I would recommend eating the entire website because his tutorials are how I learned Visual Effects!
http://www.videocopilot.net/basic/tutorials/04.Keying/
Check out some of the fantastic roto work they did on Mad Max Fury Road! IT’S LITERALLY SO INSANE. (Look at 3:20)