503 - Final Scene Compositing

 This scene was a mammoth to do, and took me many hours. As I ran out of time, we decided to render the bedroom in 3D as KK already had the fully textured file. He really came through and produced an amazing image. In addition to this, he rendered the door opening on a separate layer which meant that I didn't have to rotoscope it. This essentially gave me a finished scene, however I needed to find a way to blend the FG with the BG, as well as find a way to do the lighting changes required of this scene. 

To start, I painted the FG to match the BG, as well as darkening the BG and painting a blood smear on the ground:

(Kahenya's 3D render)

(My paintover)

I was really happy with how well I could integrate the 2D painted style with the 3D BG, and even though the 3D is obviously different to the rest of the film I don't think it stands out enough to be jarring.

As there will be different lights happening in the room when the closet door is closed, I created 3 different version:

These three images represent the 3 different lighting setups in the room: no lights on, main light on and candle light. The candle light is the BG that will be the one showing when the door opens and for the rest of the scene, therefore I started the compositing of this by figuring out how exactly I can make it work and look integrated.

This took a long time, and I'm not going to go into how exactly I did it, but basically I used a lot of blending style layers and masks, as well as adjustment layers. I think the really hard aspect of this was figuring out what to do and what approach to take, and it started off quite messy as it was very much a trial and error method.

I also found out that I could actually move the photoshop compositions in 3D if i precompose them in after effects as well, therefore the process for this whole scene is to create the different lighting and the door opening in one main composition, and then in another make that composition a 3D layer and use a camera to create the camera movement. Once I keyframed all the movement within the scene, the last step is to apply the wiggle on the BG composition to create the camera sway. 

I much preferred using the camera to create camera movements rather than using the position keyframes, as it allowed me to have some natural parallazing with the coats in the FG. Also, I could keyframe the orientation as well as position, which meant that I could create the effect of looking around the scene. I used this a lot when the door opens as I could have the camera follow the blood trail, which made the door opening look much more natural. I also animated the creep's gaze following the girl's movements to show interaction and help sell the POV effect. 

For the girl, colour compositing her was the most challenging out of all the scenes. Getting her to be the right size was tricky due to the quite extreme perspective, and she really stood out from the 3D BG. To help this I colour graded her as usual, but also applied a feathered mask with a saturation layer to the bottom of her representing the glow of the candles. This helped embed her in the scene a bit more.

Overall I'm the most pleased with this scene out of all of them as the compositing of it was very challenging but I learned so much. I was also very proud how I managed to integrate the 3D and 2D BG elements, and how I problem solved to make the scene work.

To improve it I need to work on the reactions of the creep to what the girl was doing, as I don't feel he reacted strongly enough to what he saw.