Post Production Breaking down scenes

Going though each of my CGI scenes in the second half of the film and explain what I did and why.

Oringinal

This is where I started from and same for most of the CGI scenes
So black template

 Moving on to the location

For this I wanted somewhere abandoned and could be moved to any other scene in my film if needed which was useful as this was a nice spot.
This is the base template for the character so by using a reference shot with my actor and the pink arm bands I can use maya to get this.

 So here the character is placed however him and the background are both very sharp therefore by using a Mat Channel, and the alpha layer I could break the two apart and make a depth of felid on the VFX.

So above you can now see the background bridge is blurred so the focus remains on the CGI character and the foreground to the right is in focus making the scene feel natural to the audience.  I have done this because if it stayed all in focus there would be too much information to take in therefore by breaking it down into this is focused and this isn't the audience knows where to look.


This next scene I did was clever, as I had lost my footage at the factory for the showdown so had to make up something to fill the gap, therefore a recording of that event.

So the main focus is here in the palm of the hand which is just off centre of the screen, but looks nice in the framing, because of the shoulder in the shot it keeps the focused on the hand, plus the factor of the movement in the picture.

 I decided to recap the last moments as if the CGI character was watching the film just like the audience was so that there is a connection between the two subjects.

Jumping into the VFX

 As you can see the Lines where added in to emphasis the hologram/recording as it looks boring without one on

And now without the footage just a hand with a blue light from maya super boring and a weird hand...

 But here is the original footage
Just a recording of the under the bridge on a different day without the actor so difficult to figure out where the placing should be, but with slight colour correction with the hand on and off to get a nice balance of contrast.

So making the Holographic lines/playback lines.

There was some tweaking to this as I stated my comp as a white Template and then masked areas off with black solids and animated them with a controller so the "rolled" down the view creating the illusion of the holographic/playback recording.

Next section the walking
A very interesting part as referencing the actor to the CGI model was different as I copied the moments to the best of my abilities plus the go pro on him to make a first person section if needed however I ended up using the gopro footage as the actors movements plus camera shake broke the illusion of the figure walking down the forest path.

Final version

 So as you can see a bleak moment during the day just before finishing, it turned dark and cloudy on us however later the Cargo section was the sunniest part of the foot therefore by cross referencing I could get/re-create the sunlight in the footage making the film flow nicely and not have any sudden colour change.

Still from the GO pro the actor was wearing and sadly I would have liked to use the footage with the actor but it doesn't work therefore had to use the maya refernce and place the GoPro footage as the movie plane and add tweaks as it went along.

 Even after the maya CGI movement still had to make tweaks to make it believable.

Overall I'm very happy with this section as the maya render and worked so smoothly to create this Model and looks beautiful on the whole.

 Drones Flying,
Most fun and difficult section in the film.

 Between these two images above and below, the top being final version and below original, So leagues of difference here.

After the Drones were finished in maya and exported and put into after effects the first thing to do was this... the drones needed to be masked behind the trees to get the depth of field and not breaking the illusion of them flying through the trees.

 So as you can see below with the tree masked it swoops/flies behind it and then reappears giving the feeling of them being real within the scene and interacting with the BackGround.

 Adding detail to these drones.
As one of my drones looks directly at the audience on purpose to be intimidating I rendered out a secondary ambient occlusion so...

 That the model would have more shadow and become apart of the scene however this isn't enough.

 Because they are flying around they couldn't be full focus all the time therefore a blur was applied with a 2frame delay so it could slightly track wear the drone was flying next, however the effect is only slight but it has made a huge difference on the model within the scene.

Next thing would be sound as it can be normal levels around -6db here however 

  With the drone flying up and close I'll have to adjust this and create two layers on for the background drone and one for the foreground to have different levels as i want them to communicate to each other as they fly down.

Second point is the leave as I need a sound here to push them off the screen, and to leave a impact before the next scene in the film.