Potential & Limitations 4 - Greenscreening

Left - With Mask, Right - Without Mask

With the intermediate blending of all different assets together being underway, two techniques in particular became the limitations, but also with potential enclosed in them, of this didactic journey of animation. Greenscreening holds in itself many potentials which I wish to fully harness for this animation and every future one to be made. With Jay doing the 3D, I was to composite the video he gave me of the lighthouse collapsing, and with that got into research for how to do it. Considering that I am a very visual learner, I quickly searched online tutorials and found that Keylight 2.1 is the way to go - reminiscent of last year's After Effects induction. As I filtered out the green from the footage, I realized that due to the gradient fade of the smoke's opacity the green behind the inconsistent smoke only changed color and did not preserve a transparent opacity. In other words, there was no fading aspect to the smoke, making it a bit flat since it did not have translucency to reveal the background. Having said this, I researched different methods of executing this technique. The animation of the smoke can be exported in transparent PNG sequences to eliminate this problem, however, would take much longer to render out. Another thing I learned is that greenscreening is only to be used for shots that have a full opacity since the color pallette does not allow for preservation of transparency. Thus, for smoke effects (or anything that has an inconsistent opacity) one is to use the particle effects prepackaged with After Effects, which calls for a new destination of research as using them is not quite easy and straightforward. Nevertheless, I wanted to work with what I had, which is why I used a mask around the smoke contour in order to simulate that translucency that I am looking for, which also revealed to me the potentials and limitations of masks. Aware of their functionality, I experimented with the mask's "feather" level (as named in AE) around the lighthouse to find out the parameters of convergence - the mask going within the composition it is wrapped around. To my surprise, the fading worked wonders in fixing the problem, and in doing so teaching me a lesson about future endeavors where I would need to use a different technique in order to avoid the same problem.