A change in order
Sometimes a shot just doesn’t come out the way it needs to. Sometimes, when you are editing, you wish that the take could be shorter, or longer, to fit into the pacing of the overall program.
| BEFORE
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| Take this shot for instance. It’s a great shot, showing our three characters struggling up the mountain. Problem is, our actors really were struggling! Climbing up this slippery pathway was very difficult, and very dangerous. While they were following each other as closely as they could, to the camera they are too spread out. The shot was just too long, and we could not use it as it was because it broke the rhythm we were trying to establish with our editing. Also, the characters were in a different order than in the shot we show previously. What to do? |
| AFTER
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| Here’s what I did: using Commotion, I rotoscoped out our trailing actor, and put him in between the first two! This dramatically shortened the shot, and improved our continuity: now the characters were in the proper order.
Rotoscoping is a process where you trace a character or object frame by frame, so that you may cut it out or combine it with other elements. In this case, I pretty much had to trace parts of each actor, in order to combine them in this new way. I also used difference and luminence mattes, (that is, computer generated masks based on differences in motion and picture brightness) to help me composite this shot. Believe it or not, this SHOULD have been an easy thing to do, with the camera locked down in one position. It took me a little bit of extra time to do, however, because if you look closely at the BEFORE shot, you will see the camera MOVE as the first climber passes by - (he didn’t bump the camera, but by walking beside it, the snow the tripod was resting on shifted.) This little un-intended camera move made this shot much more difficult, and I had to fudge a few things to get in finished in a single day. |
