Wire removal & rotoscoping

In this post I'm going to write a brief explanation about this job I had in the year 2009. I assisted my friend and former-teacher Alfredo Velasquez with a couple of scenes that required some "clean up". The scenes are from an Ecuadorian feature film. Unfortunately we never knew the official title.

So here is the first scene. I used After Effects and Photoshop for all the process. In After Effects I used the "simple wire removal" tool, and clone stamp wherever it was needed. Photoshop came in when I needed to build a new hat for the character. As you will see, the character is coming down from the sky but spinning thanks to the rope. Yes, that rope was just any kind of rope and the knot behind the head is HUUUGE!! Now for the last part of the scene I had to do a lot, I mean a lot of frame-by-frame painting because the rope was waving in front of the balloons.

Now the second scene was much more easy but still needed some time to get done. Prior the shooting of this scene, the mirror was fine, no dust, it was clean. Later when they shot this scene they realized somebody had out it face down. Here is where I came in. My task was to replace the mirror. It had to be flawless. I started with Photoshop, got a still frame from the clean mirror and cleaned it up with some brushes (digital brushes of course). Once the back of this mirror was ready, I jumped into After Effects. This was going to be much easier to work with because I just had to match the movement of 1 layer. Well, the match didn't work out as I expected so I took the long way. I set the layer in 3D perspective and moved it, rotated it every 5 frames, sometimes 2 or even even 1 frame. You have to be very careful when you do something like this. Just like animating a character or anything else, you need a layout or a preliminary animation path. Once you get the whole sequence, then you work with the in-between. Well, after I matched the movement I did some levels correction and some brightness/contrast tweaking. You can see that sometimes the wood piece is facing upwards so it becomes a bight brighter.

Feel free to ask any questions!! Thank you.