Post Production

We figured out that we could just do post on our own shots as they came out from render. So I did post on the clips from where he enters the door, and up to the point where he reaches for the handle by the window to close it to block out the sign.

In post I mainly color corrected and adjusted levels to match up the color and light in the different shots. Most of the time I could use the same adjustment layer for all the shots, since the lighting was the same. But at some points in the movie I had small differences in the lighting. For my part I had some major differences in light between shot 1 and 2.

And this is some quick stills in sequence showing the different layers going from scratch -> Gaussian Blur -> Ambient Pass -> levels -> hue/saturation -> curves -> background images.




We did have an issue when JD was walking past windows. We had forgotten to remove the environment map from the Daylight System. So when JD was passing by the windows where we thought we had an alpha channel, we got an odd Alpha Channel where JD had blurry, white edges around him.

At first my teacher suggested adding a Luma Key to the layer, which would take away the white from the picture sequence. The problem with that was that the white was removed from other parts of the pictures as well. So it didn’t look to good. What we did then was to duplicate the layer. On the layer with Luma key on it I had a Mask with Add covering the window. This would then add the Luma Key to only the window area. On the other layer I would have a copy of the first mask with Subtract, so take away the window area. The Luma key then toned down the white lines around JD, making the much less visible. A new problem that emerged was that JDs shirt is white. And lost some color to due to the Luma Key. To solve this I added a new mask with Add (on the layer without Luma Key) to Add that layer on top of the Luma Key one. I had to animate this mask to follow JDs shoulder as he walked past the window. And this was one timeconsuming and extremely slow process. I think the end result was pretty good, especially when I look at the difference between the 2 images.



The first picture is how it looked fresh from 3Ds Max. The 2nd one is with Luma key on the entire picture. The 3rd one is with Luma Key masked out in the window. But that left some black spots on his shirt (most visible on the 2nd last picture). So to solve that I had to animate a mask around his shoulder as he passed the window.

I also did some masking on the final shots (when he comes home from the doctor). We made a huge mistake here when we didn’t render in different passes. So when I tried to fade the apartment from being good looking, to being bad looking I had JD on the same pass as the rest of the apartment. This made fading the apartment to ugly, without JD being faded as well, very hard. The first few shots was ok to work with, since JD wasn’t standing in an area that I faded to ugly, but when I started trying to fade the later shots I had JD in the middle of the shot. Masking out around JD turned out to be way to time consuming, so I couldn’t do that (would probably have been faster to do a new render in pass instead of masking him out). In the end I ended up having to include JD in the mask fading to ugly, so JD became ugly as well. This was not our original intention, but if I was to skip the entire fade to ugly sequence we felt that parts of the story were “lost”. And in the end we considered the story to be more important than the looks.

If I were to do this again I would defiantly render in more passes. Having JD on one, background on one and maybe one for shadows. We would have had it much easier if we had rendered in more passes than Ambient and Color. Especially the fading from good looking to bad looking apartment.