Serenthia Ross
12/10/04
CpSc 815 Final Project – ‘Twas The Night Before Finals
Story
Two students come back to the office and notice that they have a final exam the next morning. Instead of studying they sit down and play video games. Eventually, one of the students decides to leave and study while the other continues to play. The ‘bad’ version of the student pops on the left shoulder and says to keep playing. The ‘good’ version pops up on the right shoulder and says to go study. Things go back and forth until the remaining student decides to study as well.
Description
We decided on doing something with multiple instances of a real person and keep the theme with Christmas (title and text). We came up with a little dialogue and figured out the time it took to deliver each line. Next, we filmed Serenthia in front of the blue screen performing the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ versions of herself.
We recorded voices for the parts in the sound studio taking care that what we said matched the gestures in the blue screen footage.
Pulling mattes for the blue screen footage was rather
difficult. We didn’t have any lights to
cancel out the shadows cast on the screen.
The ‘bad’ version of Serenthia had black pants
on which gave us a lot of trouble since the shadow on the blue screen was
almost as dark as her pants. We
approached pulling the matte in two different ways…KeyLight
and Primatte. Keylight gave us the best matte but there was a mysterious
halo-like line around the body we couldn’t get rid of. We switched over to Primatte
and had pretty good success.
Here are a few images from the KeyLight and Primatte results in Shake
To keep Serenthia’s alter egos from jumping all over the place, we tracked some specific patterns on her shirt. Of course, tracking forward and backward and averaging the results proved useful. The tracking for the ‘good’ Serenthia turned out a little better than for the ‘bad’ one. Given a little more time it wouldn’t be so hard to fix the errors.
Final Movie
We submitted the DVD on Friday. If the DVD acts up then we’ll throw a compressed version on Beast.