Tower in a Field from Seth Brower and Vimeo
This was my experiment in Tracking, it was an attempt at taking something that I knew would be problematic and working it till the result was good enough.
If you look at the breakdown in my reel, or have a feel for these things, you can see that because of the way the footage is framed, there are no tracking points anywhere in the lower half of the shot. This led to serious issues when it came to asset placement.
Originally in the pre-production stage, the tower was to be a more of a foreground element, and a live action person would be inserted onto the balcony. However once tracking was completed and timed out, it was evident that the speed at which the tower would fly by making the visual next to worthless.
So instead it was pushed back into a clearing of trees, creating the interesting effect of being in front & behind trees at separate points. To adjust this I ended up rotoscoping out the 6 individual trees that came into contact with the tower, allowing for different layering effects.
All of the foreground elements, the separate cow plates, the fence, and the car itself, all had to be placed in. The fence and car while tricky in some respects were relatively easy. The issues came in with the addition of the cows.
All of the cow footage was of a nature that would not lend itself well too keying, to much color bleed between the nature backgrounds and the muted cow colors, so each had to be hand rotoscoped out, in many cases frame by frame. This was then followed by the fact that without tracking points, the entirety of their motion had to be hand keyed, based of the visual of the ground layer and how it moved.
As each cow, at a different distance from the camera had to respond to the parallax effect slightly differently. This was where the majority of the time was spent.
Overall I am happy with the work, as with all things, I could probably keep playing with it without being completely satisfied, but that’s the nature of art.