Mailroom transition - just about there

Here's that same shot on the verge of completion (below). Just need a bit of fake mail to fly around in the opening segment to give it some life. A nice touch towards the end is the red Russian style poster. Using an additive blend mode, I was able to keep Jon's shadow passing across it with no matting or masking. This shot has cuts in the middle of it, but it was easiest to work it through as one complete shot to get cutup later..

Transition for the mail room

Different shot here and below is the midpoint of work on it. This shows usually what things look like after the first batch of elements are thrown together in AfterEffects. There isn't too much to smoothing this one out. In the maya generated box tunnel, I'll be adding tracking dots that AfterEffects can then use to map the 3d move and push that opening footage off to the left automatically rather than by my doing it by hand - it would be a little difficult to do with the arcing movement. Then the tunnel will get a few more boxes thrown in to make it more claustrophobic and not so regular. The lighting gets tweaked to match the environments of the two shots and the ending will get slowed down a bit so that we ease into the room instead of launch in. A nice touch is the rack focus towards the end as focus goes from the boxes to the zoetrope - it really covers the seams of where the cg meets the real footage. And there is still plenty of filtering to give the zoetrope room the proper fantasy feel.

Complete mail station

So the compositing has finished and here's the original footage:


and the result:


Some of the seam lines between the real and cg footage are still noticeable if you look closely, but not too bad. The real leap forward with matching the digital still to the live action was to incorporate a few translucent filters that covered both, thus making the cutting line less noticeable - the neon glow down into the real box wall and the yellow glow down the right corridor.

Mail station facelift

This main tube drop station is getting an interesting treatment. What started as a simple static shot is now getting a moving jib camera treatment as well as a much larger digital matte painting. The first step was to matte out everything from the live action shot that didn't have actors moving. Then cg boxes were added to the foreground with a slow sweeping forward movement:

The color of each section is a bit off as well as the focus, but those are easily fixed. Below is the matte painting that needs to get flowed in behind the live action:

Once merged and filtered it should be relatively seamless.. results soon!

More of the tube station

Here's the shot sequence I've been working with lately. It's coming together, but still a bit clunky and the mattes on the shots before and after the cgi need some touchup. Once the timing is finalized, the two tube station shots at the end will get some extra mail flying around as well as some foreground boxes to block the lighting that is seen now. The shot that comes before this is the massive digital painting of the entire tube station. This is the centerpiece of effects work for the Mailman short, so it gets a good section of attention..

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