MOLTEN PICTURES LLC

A Day in Heaven
Heaven
status - done

I would like to refer to this sequence as the greenscreen nightmare. There are wrinkles in the fabric, dark shadows in all shots, and moving cameras that prevent easy roto work. Furthermore this scene was shot with those spiffy Sony HD cameras, so the native HDV compression adds another level of frustration.

This is the scene between Rudy and Carmen in this stylized version of heaven. What I need to do is give heaven a nice glow, and knock out the greenscreen behind the bars and replace it with heaven. There are 45 shots in this scene with varying complexity. The hardest ones have this nasty greenscreen and the easiest ones need a glow.

Time permitting I need to add halo's to the angels, however that won't be an easy effect. In most scenes it's not a big deal but in a few I have angels walking behind bars and obscured behind characters. I don't know if it's better to be consistent and give everyone a halo or if it works for the story to only give a few of them halos. I don't know so I am going to see if I have time near the end. I don't want to cut the halos but it might just be too much work to meet the deadline.

It's kinda funny that I get the greenscreen from hell in a scene that's supposed to be heaven.

Here is a shot breakdown

DONE
The scene starts with a wide shot of heaven. I have two shots from this angel. On the far right is the greenscreen. There is a camera move that means I can't just roto the bars. These will be tricky

DONE
Next up is a good closeup of an angel guard. Check out that greenscreen!

DONE
Got a quick shot of the three here. No GS so I am happy about this

This shot needed a little bit or extra work, a crop to get rid of someones head in the foreground, the shot was stabalized, and then the glow was added.

Before and after comparison (.2 MB)

DONE
I have one shot of these two, easy.

DONE
Here is where it starts to really hurt. I've got three shots of this gate sequence, which is a major point in the story. I get a wrinkly greenscreen and fine detail the sony camera destroyed with it's compression. The camera doesn't move so at least I can roto out the bars.

An in depth look at how bad this is!

Layer breakdown video (5.6 MB
Final Shot part 1 (2 MB)
Final Shot part 3 befroe/after (3.2MB)

DONE
Three shots of the guys here.

15 shots of the woman with the greenscreen behind her. This is going to be a lot of work. The bars are casting a very dark shadow and the camera moves.

DONE
8 shots of the dude here, just need to add that heavenly glow.

DONE
2 over the shoulder shots, easy.

DONE
Finally I have 4 shots from this angel. I've got to do something with that background. These might be tough.

INDEX