Week #5: Keying w/ After Effects

This week's assignment revolved around keying green screen footage in After Effects. I'm excited to finally be able to play around with green screens now. This was all new to me, so I had a lot of fun with keying and video editing with After Effects and Premier. It took a while to learn and trail and error, but I think I got the gist of it.

Because there was a specific narrative I wanted to tell with my initial world, I couldn't find any green screen footage that fit. So instead, I decided to have some fun and used green screen footage of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Rather than creating a new world, I used the SunTemple project to serve as the location. I think the fact that the location and Van Damme clearly don't synergize well makes it funnier. To further this intent, I added a Luchador character from Mixamo.

One issue I overlooked was that even after keying out the footage, there were black bars at the top and bottom of the footage. I couldn't find a solution until I remembered masking, and just masked out the area with the black bars and it worked. Another one was that after I had imported everything into UE4, and make the material Translucent and Unlit, it still showed the black background. It took me an hour to realize tha I didn't include the Alpha when I created the PNG Sequences in After Effects. After redo-ing the PNG Sequences, it worked.

Things I'd like to improve on:

• Looking at the video, I noticed there isn't much camera movement. I'd like to add slight camera movement in certain shots just so that the entire short could feel a bit more "alive".

• The Luchador walking animation shifts back when the animation finishes. I'd like to fix this and make the animation smooth and seamless.

• The important green screen footage has areas where Van Damme is transparent and you can see through his body. I believe this is probably due to the parameters of Screen gain and Screen Matte, Clip Black. I'd have to play around with the values to find a better balance.