Part 6 of 8: Compositing-Part 2

The next major compositing challenge was to place the road and airplane behind Jeremy. Although a lot of these shots were shot live on the freeway, they still needed to have an airplane inserted into the background. In many cases it was easier to also add an entirely new CG backgound as well. In this shot the airplane engine, wing and landing gear were added as well as a new, higher roadside horizon line.

For most of the shots the camera was locked-off, or stable so a single frame could be used to paint out the area of the windows to be replaced in Photoshop. But an animated matte for Jeremy's head was needed to track his motions throughout the shot. This was created using a spline matte in Digital Fusion. Notice the open sunroof in the before image, above. This was a problem throughout 405. The day of the shoot the weather consisted of low, patchy clouds. This created a lighting condition where some shots were bright and some were very dark. To compensate for this the sunroof was opened and closed and unfortunately some of the best takes included this open sunroof. In order to salve the continuity error a closed sunroof was painted and hand tracked frame by frame into many of the shots.