-
how to do this effect?
I’m working in AE 5.5 and have only done really basic stuff so I’m needing help on this. I’d like to create an effect using two clips where it appears that a woman is “walking into” one of her paintings. I’m shooting one clip where the woman is walking away from the camera at the top of a hill so she’ll be basically in silhouette, against the sky. Then I’ll have footage of the painting. I’m not sure if there’s a way to “cut away” all but the woman’s figure and then use opacity and motion/size of her walking figure to create the illusion? I’m still a novice with effects, so I don’t know how to “cut away” the background around the figure while it’s in motion, or even if this is the best way to do this. Any suggestions on the best way to achieve this illusion would be most appreciated.
Thanks so much-
-
3 Replies
-
There’s no trick that I know of. After you key out the sky using a keying effect in AE, you’ll have to draw a mask around her body using the pen tool. If her body were a vertical cylinder sliding into the painting, you could get away with contracting the mask using a negative mask expansion value in the mask properties in the timeline. In your case, you might be able to do that by drawing a mask around the head and torso and contracting.
However, you’ll have to draw extra masks for her arms and legs, because they will “break the membrane” of the painting in different ways. You may be able to contract the masks with the expansion value, but you’ll probably have to animate the mask shape with keyframes. This is called “rotoscoping”. Make a keyframe at each major change in the motion mask shape, and let AE calculate the frames in between.
Some things still have to be done by hand. 🙂
Steve -
Thanks for your response. Can you point me in the direction of any good/simple tutorials on both mask use (as you’ve described it) and keying–as I don’t really know how to do them.
thanks again- -
Without third-party keying software, keying is best done with the Keylight effect in the AE Pro version, in my opinion. There are other keying options in the Pro version, but Keylight seems to work the best.
Another AE-only option is to apply the Color Keyer multiple times to the footage layer. You just choose a different color each time and tweak the settings. Sometimes it does the job. Check out “greenscreen” or “bluescreen” in the COW tutorials section.
As for masking, you can search the COW or the tutorialfind site, but I don’t know if you’ll find any beginner masking tutorials. Start with the manual. Draw with the pen tool, try selecting “rotobezier” when drawing organic shapes. If you want to cut a hole in something, set the mask to “invert”, or to “subtract” if you’ve already drawn other masks. I think you have to jump in.
Steve
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up