The Grand Finale: Adventures in the World of Chroma Keying

The Final Project    

For my final project of the year, I was tasked to explore the process of chroma keying, which is the technique of removing a background from footage to place said footage over another background. This is typically done with the use of a green screen, which I did use. I worked with my friend Mike Webster (his blog has been linked) to film some very basic footage in front of a green screen, and then used the Keylight plugin in After Effects to remove the background and place it over a background image. After getting the footage, we both edited it in our own separate way. Given the closeness to the end of the year, there was not much time to polish the final product, although I did create a very rough version that demonstrates the process to some degree.

The Project and Pre-Production

My own project involved me walking up to greet a friend, walking away, and tripping/exploding in a blaze of glory. It was laid over a background of a calm looking field, mostly because said background was free and from a website that was not full of malware. I began the process by creating a very simple storyboard, attached below, to plan out the simple action of the scene. Afterward, I went and downloaded a few free green screen images to practice the chroma keying process (you can see one of my attempts, the Chernobyl Cat, below). This practice was nice, but not entirely representative of real chroma keying, given how the background of the subject (the cat) was one perfectly solid block of color. This luxury was not afforded to me in the actual project, due to inconsistencies in the lighting of the green screen as well as the camera being somewhat out of focus. At any rate, the next step was to film the footage that would be overlaid on the background.

The Storyboard. Not much, but it's something.

A smaller version of the background image we used.

It's a cat in Chernobyl. I don't know where I was going with this.

Production and Post-Production

After acquiring a camera, Mike and I filmed the scene (not a tremendous task, given its simplicity), and imported the raw footage into After Effects. Using a plugin called Keylight, I took a sample of the green screen's coloration and modified the Clip White, Clip Black, and Screen Gain parameters until the green screen was completely transparent while Mike and I were completely opaque, with a somewhat transparent outline surrounding us. I also modified the Screen Shrink/Grow and Screen Softness parameters to soften the edge between the foreground and background. Finally, I added some assets from the Action Essentials footage pack to create the explosion, and used a sound clip from SoundBible.com to put the finishing touch on. You can see the raw and final footage below. Had I had more time, I would have also added color and lighting correction to the foreground to make it match the background image, and also would have refined the edge of the foreground footage to make the blend between the foreground and background even smoother. Most of the issues came from the somewhat shoddy camera work we did, as the camera was not focused well, nor was the green screen lit particularly well. There was only so much I could have done in post-production to fix said issues, although I did what I could to make the final result as presentable as possible. I also would have better refined the Action Essentials assets to feather out the edges of the explosion and smoke, but again, time constraints prevented me from doing so.

The Concepts Involved and Lessons Learned

Through this exercise, I learned the basics of the chroma keying process, including setting up a green screen, taking the foreground footage, and using Keylight to render the green screen transparent. In addition, I learned more about the process of planning live-action shooting (however simplistic said shooting may have been) and how to deal with complications in the shooting process (read: it took us about a week to get access to the studio and a camera). I also got a slight review in overlaying assets for special effects, although it was not the main focus. This was a nice refresher in special effects editing, which I haven't done much of since the end of my sophomore year. Knowledge of chroma keying is instrumental for a majority of special effects in movies, so knowing the process, even if I likely won't end up using it much myself, makes it much easier to understand and appreciate the work and thought processes involved. Although the end result wasn't that great, I believe that, with more time for refinement through color correction and edge transparency as well better raw footage, using the same method would have yielded a presentable result.

A Reflection of this Semester

My main projects this semester were this, and the Goodnight Moon animation detailed in my last post. Both involved a break from 3D work in Maya and had a heavy focus on After Effects use. Both were not ridiculously difficult in terms of technique, so I didn't have too much difficulty with any of them. Maintaining focus on Goodnight Moon was at times difficult, due to the large amounts of work involved in animating almost every segment of the book in Photoshop as well as syncing it with the voiceover and sound effects, but I did manage to finish it without any major complaints. You can see the final version below.

This project, although quick, was very information-dense. However, this information (at least the pieces that I learned) was fairly easy to take in and apply to my work. Like I said, my main qualm with this project wasn't the work with the actual post-production editing, it was with the initial shooting of the footage. I don't have much of a background in video, so I just went with what Mike said and hoped for the best. Considering the fact that I only learned about this skill a week ago and only had two or three days to put this together, I'm not too upset about it.

Unrelated to the two major projects this semester, I also received an honor at the eMagine Media Festival for my character model, Kopf, that I made in the first semester. I was within the top 5 of 9 submitted, and while I did not place in the top 3, after seeing the winners I was perfectly fine with not doing so. The work put into all of the pieces at the festival awed me, from web design to typography to documentary to character modeling. I was humbled to be considered among the nominees, and am greatly appreciative of the opportunity I had to partake in the festival. You can see several rotations of the model with varying render qualities below.

I will close on a broader reflection of my involvement with e-Comm as a whole. This will be my last year with the program, due to issues with class schedules and simply a lessened zeal for the material. I believe that I can apply what I have learned about accessibility and the basic principles of design to almost anything I do. I also greatly enjoyed learning about more niche elements of animation, like lighting and rendering in mental ray and designing characters in Maya (even if my work was somewhat rough). However, I do not believe at this point that I want to make a career out of this field. I simply lack the zeal for it I once did, and while I still greatly appreciate what I have learned, I just don't think that continuing with the program would be the best use of my time in high school. Now that I've learned the basics of things like organizing projects, creating accessible designs, and operating software like Photoshop and After Effects, I don't feel that deeper involvement with the program will help me more than other academic focuses. I am grateful for the friends I've made and instruction I've received, but I believe that it is best for me to leave the e-Communications program in order to further my new goals for life.

Goodnight Moon Animation: It's For Da Kids

My latest project has been to animate a reading of the board book Goodnight Moon so that my class can include it in a compilation of similar projects to send to an area children's hospital. Given how this is a rather humanitarian gesture, I decided I should probably treat it with some air of seriousness. Because my ability to produce hand-drawn art is subpar at best (read: I can barely do stickmen) and there is not near enough time to animate a 3D environment for my book, I resorted to a Photoshop animation compiled in After Effects. I'll go more in-depth on the production process below, and also include storyboards, rough animations, and all sorts of other fun resource-y stuff.

Pre-Production

As mentioned before, I am animating the book Goodnight Moon in Photoshop and After Effects (with audio capture in Final Cut Pro and edited in Audacity, since I have no idea how Final Cut works). The planning and pre-production phase mainly consisted of me rereading the book and getting down the proper rhythm to read it at, while also scanning in the book's pages and storyboarding the changes I would be making to each page. For example, on the page reading "And there were three little bears, sitting on chairs," I storyboarded it so that the bears would open their eyes as I read. I scanned the book's pages in using our fancy-schmancy Epson scanner (which makes a whole lot of cool sounds) so that I could later alter them. I've included the three storyboard pages I created below.

My storyboards (Observe my lack of drawing skills)

As you can see, for my storyboards, I listed the text being read, the planned animation for the page, any audio clips I would need to find, and then drew a really, REALLY rough sketch of the altered element. After this process was complete, I moved on to the actual creation.

Production

I began the process of animating the pages in Photoshop by importing the scanned pairs of pages and changing the canvas and image sizes so that only one page was showing. I then selected the actual pages (while scanning them in, the scanner also included extra empty space) with the Quick Selection Tool and created a new layer by copying them, hiding the background layer under them. After that, the process began to vary. I made a lot of small alterations using one very simple process: the content-aware fill. Since I was working with pre-drawn images that I couldn't really add on to, my only real option was to play with what was already there. To do this, I would make a selection of the element on the page that would be animated (for example, the cow that jumps over the moon) with the Quick Selection Tool and create a new layer by copy from that selection. I then hid the new layer, selected the original background layer, and covered the area encompassing the element with a marquee. After that, I used the content-aware fill to fill in the background layer and unhid the copied layer. This gave me a replica of the element that I could alter the position and opacity of. I also had to do this with some text containers, since they were in positions that would interfere with the animation or were too difficult to see. For some pages, like the one with the little toy house, I made further alterations (like the dark windows). To do that, I just duplicated the copied layer to make a second copy of the element. Finally, for some pages, I just panned across the background, which just involved a position keyframe in Photoshop. After I made the animations in Photoshop, I exported them as .mp4 files, and imported them into After Effects.

Post-Production (Unfinished as of now)

In After Effects, I began the process of synchronizing the audio with the animation. In order to do this, I had to cut some clips short (I made them all with a little bit of extra time), and also had to do a Time Stretch on some clips to make the animation synch better. The process was pretty menial, since most of it consisted of me waiting for the RAM Preview to catch up to where I was (After Effects doesn't play audio with the default preview, and RAM Preview always starts from the beginning). I'm still working on synchronizing some scenes, improving the audio, and finding good sound effects, but you can see the work I've done so far in the rough (read: REALLY REALLY ROUGH) animation below.

I'll keep updating this post as I make more edits, but that's all I have for now.

EDIT: I'll probably end up putting this is Post-Production after I finish the project entirely and finalize this blog post, but I figure I should update my current progress. I've found sound effects for most of the elements, but still need to find a good "plop" sound for the mush. I synchronized most of the sound effects pretty well, but I'm still toying around trying to make it the best it can be. I also sped up the balloon in the first scene, since it was moving much slower than it does later on, and added in the text for the first page. Since the text for the first page was on an entirely separate page, I had to grab the text from that separate page, grab a black text bubble from another page, and then overlay those two on top of the first scene. I've also been working on getting rid of the book's crease in Photoshop, mainly through the content-aware fill. On pages where there's nothing but white space or solid colors behind the crease, it's been very easy. On other pages where things like the fireplace or wood basket are in the way, it has been a trek to keep the content-aware fill from obliterating whatever object was in the way. I used the Brush tool to fill in areas of the crease that content-aware fill couldn't, taking a color sample from a near area and trying to free-hand the design to look as believable as possible. (Also, content-aware fill hates the patterns on the rug and wood basket. I had to redo all of that by hand with the Brush tool. It wasn't fun.)

Items still on the agenda include audio edits to my voiceover and finding a few elusive sound effects, as well as finishing getting rid of the crease. I'm also going to try to darken the rabbit's room after he says "Goodnight light," probably through an adjustment layer with low Brightness. I'll see how it works and whether or not I want to include it, since I won't really know how well it will work until I do it. I'll finalize this post whenever I finish/a new deadline approaches.