Deep

Deep was a short experimental film project. When it was presented to us it was not finished. Since it was part of our Animation Practice module, we had to work on it. At the beginning of the semester we were divided into groups. Each group was working on one or more scenes. At first I had been given the task to work on the nightclub interior scene. My job was to take a rough footage, remove its green screen, run some de-spill operations and composite it with several background. The other members of the group had to create the backgrounds. Since this film was experimental many of the scenes would be created in a different style. Our scenes were supposed to combine 2D animation and live action. While the others were creating the backgrounds and doing the animation, I had to wait for the live action shots to be processed. Due to some issues it took about 3 weeks.  As soon as I took the scenes I imported them into nuke. At first I noticed that nuke has a plug-in called “Keylight”, that I have previous experience with in After Effects. I connected it’s node to the footage and tried to key out the green color.

After a long time of trial and error I was unable to key out the green screen. This was because of several reasons. First of all there was background noise. I could not remove it without cutting parts of the black dress. Another issue was that the dress was very reflective. So it reflected parts of the green screen and lights. When I attempted to key out the green the plug-in automatically deleted all of those parts of the dress. For a while I left that scene and tried to handle another tricky part, which was namely the hair.

This was a big issue, since in many parts of the video the hair was a bit blurred. This made it very hard for me to key. Also parts of the hair seemed to form weird shapes after the rough key. At this stage I decided to try out different techniques to solve this problem. I tried different built in keyer plug-ins, but they we not sophisticated enough to handle this operation. At the end I managed to find “Primatte”. This is one of the foundry’s most advanced keyer. It uses an advanced 3d algorithm to solve keying issues. To begin with I connected it to the footage. Then I picked the green color using the color picker. Afterwards a series of operations followed such as background and foreground noise removal, detail preservation and matte correction. Surprisingly enough this worked perfectly.

There were some issues with parts of the video but, I was able to reduce them by playing around with the settings. The only video that I did not manage to fix was the last one. Here due to dimmed lights the green screen covering the floor could not be removed completely. After this was completed I simply composited the footage with the background images. The color grading was done in After effects. Since I am quite familiar with the program it was easy enough to add some hue exaggeration until the color of the background matched the color of the skin.

This is the final video: