Car Scene
An interior scene of two characters driving in a car. Compositing was crucial to achieving a photorealistic result.
I began by researching into techniques and concepts that would help me to further understand how to key a shot to a high standard. I wanted to pick a challenging shot for this project so that I could ensure that I had fully learnt all the techniques for keying properly. For this project I shot an interior car shot from ActionVFX. The reflections in the far window seemed like a hard task to maintain whilst removing the green key. As well as this there is a lot of hair detail in the shot that had to be kept.
I split the key into two separate tasks; creating the matte, and despilling the shot. For the matte I used the IBK keying nodes in Nuke. After testing them extensively I found them to be a very time-efficient method of keying, whilst maintaining an incredibly high-standard key. After creating the base matte, I used rotoscoped grade nodes to adjust the alpha created in certain areas that I felt the keyer had failed to maintain all the detail.
After this I moved on to the despill. Using expressions within Nuke, I removed the green from the shot whilst still maintaining the luminosity of the scene. I also added an edge despill, which blended the edges of the key with the average colour of the background I was adding.
After this I combined the matte and the despill and merged this new plate over the background footage. I then made several adjustments to further blend the two plates, such as colour correcting the foreground and defocusing the background.
One detail I wanted to add that I felt would help make the shot appear more realistic was a foreground reflection of the background, to create the appearance of glass being between the camera and the interior of the car. This effect was achieved by blending a zoomed-in version of the background on top of the foreground, as well as adding a dirt texture over that to add detail to the glass effect.
