Planning: Masking Subject and Placing It In Another Shot

This type of effect I will surely be using for most of the production of my music video. Although, it is still rather alien to me, I thought I'd get used to it before actually applying it to my real media product. During this task, I hope to achieve the right skills to match the subject and its new surroundings.

I decided to practise this using some footage I shot during casting to play the role for the two cats in the music video. I believe that by using the same subject as for the music video will allow me to get used to how the subject behaves before working with it for a long period of time. I picked one of the full-body shots that was around the cat's eye level. As usual, I carried out the masking in After Effects and converted the clip for Premiere Pro use with a green background so that ultra keying is easier to do when editing the shots together. I chose to work with a simple background so that I had more space to think about the editing rather than worrying about the complicated surroundings that may make the process difficult.

Once the green screening was removed, I noticed how out of place the cat looked. The original setting was rather warm-coloured, and the cat's brown-tinted coat contrasts against the cool atmosphere in the shot. 

To match the two, I decided to apply the three-way colour corrector effect. This allowed me to adjust the shadows, mid-tones and highlights using the colour wheels to locate the suitable colours. 

Although the cat looks more settled with these changes, I still think that it could use some more alterations to its colouring. I looked closer at the background and noticed how the black screens on the macs are rather tinted blue and lack in contrast. I decided that using this to guide me will allow me to achieve the right colouring as both subjects are black coloured so should react to the lighting in the same way. 

To act upon the statement above, I added a tint effect - something I haven't yet used in previous editing sessions. I noticed that you can tint the black and white areas of the shot as well as adjust the amount of its impact. Using the colour pipette, I referred back to the computers to match the dark and light areas of the cat's coat. I played around with the amount and concluded to this: 

Although the subject still appears out of place, I decided to stick with these settings as I think its the best I can do. 

At the moment, the cat is still in its original place. To have it actually walking across the desk, I had to adjust quite a lot of settings to get the right position and speed of the clip as the cat moves. These included things like adjusting the location of the cat using the x and y axis, and also a lot of keyframes to smoothly transition in-between the settings.

I noticed that when adjusting the settings on each keyframe, the trail appears on top of the actual footage. It's a lot of help as you can visually see the path of the movement you're creating. 

Another addition that I had to edit was the shadow of the cat. I had to duplicate the original layer with its current settings and play around with the clip's dimensions as well as position so that it sat right beneath the original clip. Likewise, I had to apply the horizontal flip effect so it mirrored the original cat. I had to decrease the height so that it looked squished due to the angle of the camera.

I decided to leave the shadow un-tinted so it had some hint of darkness to it in comparison to the original clip. However, observing the surroundings, the texture of the desk blurs almost all the shadows within the rest of the environment. 

I added the gaussian blur effect to the shadow layer and ensured that the blur dimensions were working both ways; vertically and horizontally. I settled with the strength of 133.0. 

I think that at this stage the shadow is still too big, so I added a crop effect to limit its size until the shadow looks like its right beneath the cat and not larger than its true size. 

There's always room for improvement, especially in this edit. As a first attempt at this challenge, I think I have done rather well, such as getting the colouring of the two to match. However, there are a lot of areas that could use improvement. 

One area that could use adjusting is the masking of the cat. Due to the movement of the legs, it caused some key frames to cross over as the cat walked, which resulted in messy masking where some legs were chipped. I believe that there is a way to avoid this issue by dedicating several masking layers for each leg and the body so that there is more control over the subject. At the same time, I won't have to worry about the many masking points crossing over each other or being untidily grouped together that makes masking harder when the marks need separating again. 

Another mistake that made the editing difficult was the movement and shaking of the camera of the original shot. With this, I had to play around with the position of the subject on screen to reduce the movement of the camera, however we can still see the cat strangely shaking in its place, which makes the result look rather odd. Although I attempted at stabilizing the clip by applying warp stabilizer and ticking the frame blending option when right-clicking on the clip, it wasn't enough to completely get rid of the shaking.

Original footage

Outcome

I later decided to challenge myself further by taking some footage of a subject matter and place it in a contrasting location to really test my technical skills and try to match the conditions in order for both elements to harmonise.

This time, I tried something more surreal; I took some footage of my guppy using a high speed camera, and took him outside of the tank and placed it in unusual locations, such as the kitchen, and outdoors.

I found it much more challenging in comparison to the previous practise, as the lighting conditions are completely different in the resources that I had to work with. I really had to think about the adjustments that I had to make to match the guppy with the background footage. Because the artificial lighting in the aquarium is very bright compared to the kitchen that isn't as well lit, or the street in the evening, so I had a lot of balancing to do in the tonal range.

Once again, I discovered that it was very difficult to work with the guppy because it was constantly moving, and this meant that I had to match the movement of the camera for the background with the guppy's shot, and it was a difficult task. I had to end up moving the guppy around in Premiere Pro to have it actually swim around in the location.

I think this is something I will have to keep in mind when shooting the actual footage for the music video, that I manage to shoot both subjects as steadily as possible so that it is easier for me to match both clips and focus on other parts of the video.