Creating Visual FX has been an interest of mine since I was introduced to the art while learning the 3D modelling and animation software Blender3D; the free open source software package used by amature and professional artists.

My skills were significantly improved when I purchased the Visual Effects for Directors and Hot Moves: The Science Of Awesome training DVDs from Hollywood Camera Work. Most of my early work is based on the freely available green screen and tracking plates provided on their site.
Visual Effects

Visual FX

Hole in the road

This shot is from a BlenderGuru tutorial where Blender was used to track and composite a CG hole onto a perfectly fine road. Instead of using the new Blender tracking feature I used SynthEyes to track the shot. I wanted to use SynthEyes as it has a very good lens distortion workflow which allows you to re-distort the CG elements to better match the original distorted plate. Blender was used for the graphics and FinalCut Pro X for combining the original plates and the hole.

Toy car roto

This plate shows a toy car shot against a green screen. A light is circled over the car to provide dynamic “street” lighting. The key challenge with this shot is the significant amount of reflections on the car of the green screen. This was addressed by creating a hand made rotoscope mask for the outline of the vehicle. The car was color corrected in the compositor. To make the shot more convincing a matchmove was produced from the background street plate and the resulting camera shake was transferred to the original green screen shot.
Check out the results...

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Virtual character interaction by live-action actors

This plate shows the actress focused intently on the CG character (she doesn’t look very pleased). A matchmove was necessary to ensure the CG character stood correctly in the scene with the eyes located at the point of focus i.e. the white ball on a stick. The green screen spill was not too bad except on the side of here face.
I incorporated the bunny character from the Big Buck Bunny open movie and animated it to fit the scene.
Check out the results....

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.
Bunny character (c)Blender Foundation from www.bigbuckbunny.org.

Virtual set interaction by live-action characters

In this plate she walks over and sits on a chair. To replace the green screen prop with a CG chair a matchmove was used to match the plate with the CG environment as well as provide some feature tracks on the green screen chair. These features were used to obtain the correct positioning of the new chair.
The biggest problem with this plate was the huge amount of green spill on the actor. Normally this would be minimised by using spill suppression techniques e.g. black cloth etc. The result is that the procedural matte is a little extreme!
Check out the results....

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Window set extension matchmove and compositing

This shot calls for an outdoor scene to be added for the window. It required a green screen matte that would retain the glass reflections from the room. Although you won’t be able to see in the online video, the faint room reflections were composited back into the HD output. The matchmove worked very well as there were plenty of features that provided excellent parallax.
I added some sound effects to give it more life.
Check out the results....

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Pan-Tilt-Roll with 2 markers matchmove and compositing

This is a simple tripod camera shot with only two markers to indicate the pan-tilt-roll motion of the camera.
I added some sound effects to give it more life.
Check out the results....

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Single marker pan-tilt matchmove and compositing

This is a simple pan-tilt shot so the matchmove was fairly simple. The green screen cloth however has wrinkles so required some roto work to supplement the procedural matte.
I added some sound effects to give it more life.
Check out the results....

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Green screen matchmove and compositing

This is a matchmove exercise in addition to the green screen matte extraction and compositing. The matchmove was performed with SynthEyes and used in Blender to animate the background scene.
I added some sound effects to give it more life.
Check out the results....

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Matte extraction, spill removal and compositing

This shot required a number of techniques to complete. I had to rotoscope the gun when it passed in front of the mic stand and the ceiling. Also colour spill removal was difficult due to the high gloss of her coat.
I added some sound effects to give it more life.
Check out the results....

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Basic matchmove and compositing

This plate is a basic test matchmove shot. This procedural matte created for this plate needs a bit more work but the point was to test the matchmove so it is good enough for this.
Check out the results....

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Basic shadow matte extraction

This is a test to see how well you can isolate a shadow matte. Separating this matte simplifies the composite because you have fine control over the appearance of the shadow density and colour.
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The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Tracking plate

To replace the green screen surface with an image of a famous painting a matchmove is required to track the canvas.
Check out the result...

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Matte extraction with transparency

The two difficult parts of this composite were dealing with the transparency of the material and the colour correction due to the high green spill in the original video sequence.
Check out the result...

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.

Fine detail matte extraction

This is a test to see how well you can deal with fine details such as hair.
Check out the result...

The source video sequence for this shot is from Hollywood Camera Work.