Unit 17- P7 SECOND SUBMISSION.

Applying visual effects:

Here, you can see mask paths and compositing being used as the shot is a combination of various different images having been put together. As well as this, the shot uses a reflection effect to give the illusion that there is glass between the actors and the space.

To make this piece of footage, the first thing that I needed to do was to key out the background. To do that I needed to use the chroma-key effect in Adobe After Effects to key out the green in the background. Unfortunately, because of shine on the silver paint on the model, the green from the green-screen was reflected onto the model which meant that keying wasn't a viable way to remove the green-screen. To remove the green-screen, I masked out the model, using several different mask layers for the different parts of the model's silhouette. I then applied the Hue and Saturation effect onto the mask layers so that I could change the saturation on the reflection to sliver, rather than green, so that it matched the model's paint. As the the camera changed angle in the clip, I needed to adjust the mask so that it continued to keep the correct silhouette of the model. This involved adding lots of keyframes (one for each frame) and adjusting where the bezier handles were for each point of the mask. I needed to adjust the bezier handles for each individual frame of the footage. To make the explosion I used different pieces of stock footage from a copyright free stock footage website, I layered them on top of one another so that it would look like a more detailed explosion. Behind the mask layers I added a space background photo, which I animated to make it look like it was moving as the camera moved. I did this by adding a mask path so the picture would move between two individual keyframes.

There were lots of visual effects that were used to make this scene look realistic. Firstly, there were visual effects so that the window would lead to space rather than another room. To do this, the window was masked out and the picture of space was layered behind it. A mask path was put on the picture so that it moved, giving the impression that the space station was moving. Then to make the reflection in the window, the original footage was layered onto of the new edited footage with a lower opacity. The same masking method was applied to the computer, except it was more complicated as the mask layers were overlapping which meant that the masks had to be specifically layered so that they did not get in the way of each other.