The Brief
The brief for this project was to create a CG and live action shot integration from a short 4K live action shot. This project took me through the whole matchmoving and compositing pipeline before then rendering and colour grading the project to give it my desired look.
Execution and Challenges
The first stage of the process was to colour manage the RAW shot and undistort the lens, ensuring the smooth integration of CG models as they are rendered with mathematically perfect perspectives not accounting for lens distortion. I used affine trackers to define where the floors were and track vertical elements to create the 3D landscape before adding shadow catchers to surfaces to give the shot shadows. I then created a CG robot from pre-made assets and tried to integrate these into the shot seamlessly. After rendering I came into my first real challenge, I had left some cable connectors visible in the shot. This meant when editing and colouring in Davinci I had to reframe the shot to ensure they were out of shot. I wanted the scene to have a 1970s sci-fi feel so I used the Resolve FX tools to give it the look of Kodak 5247 film stock. I graded the scene to have cyan hues and saturated reds as well as some celluloid burn to give it an authentic feel.
Final Result and Reflections
Overall I was very happy with the final result after the time and effort it had taken. It gave me a real appreciation for the meticulous work of VFX artists, the care and precision it takes is what allows for a CG model to feel like a tangible object caught on a real camera lens.