Rotoscoping - My Process and Reflection

By Giovanni Peresson 13/04/2023

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The Idea:

The aim I had set out when creating this project was to explore rotoscoping and working with greenscreen which I had not done beforehand. My inspiration for this project was a sponsorship

Will smith had with Just Water where they made a video advertisement using green screen.

There where 2 shots I had to get to do this video so my friend Matthew mc Fadden, who was already there at my house that day as I was using him as a voice actor for my sound for production project. The first shot being of the subject doing a hand motion where they levitate the object. The other shot being the product I wanted to display.

Actually doing green screen and rotoscoping is something I've never really tried when it comes to filming myself, for past videos and projects I have used the same tools and have an understanding on how they work and how to use them to get a high quality result. For this Project my main aim was the proof of concept and to experiment with it and learn from any mistakes I make and take into account for future projects

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Filming Day:

On The day for the shoot I had my lighting camera prepared beforehand. I used my Lumix g7 on a tripod and I had two soft boxes set up to light my subject, although I would later realise this was a mistake. I had Matthew wear a red top as that colour I felt would be a decent contrast with the blue background I was using to key him out in post.

I had him do some simple gestures that I would later use to create a sort of magic effect of him making a can of coke float in the air.

For the can I used the same setup although used two smaller Neewer led panels instead of the soft boxes and placed the can on a lazy Susan with an object on the bottom to give the can a little bit of tilt, I rotated the lazy Susan as evenly as I could to get smooth footage in the end.

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The Edit:

For the edit I already knew in my head what I wanted the final project to roughly look like. I wanted to key out both the can and the subject and have it look like he was levitating the can with a background that also promoted the product.

The first thing I done in Adobe After Effects was I tried to use the colour key tool to simply remove the background colour and be able to do it using that method. It was at this point I realised the mistake I had made during my shoot, I had focused on lightly the subject but I hadn't lit my background evenly and there where harsh shadows and difference in lighting across the wall. This made using the colour key tool impossible to get a high quality rotoscope of the subject.

At this point I started thinking about and looking into different methods I could use to cut out my subject, I was thinking on masking him out but this would be extremely time consuming even for a 3 second clip, that was when I came across a tool called the rotobrush in after effects which uses ai to cut out your subject, It was quite simple I had selected the first frame and make a very rough outline of Matthew and the software did the rest, I went through frame by frame made a couple adjustments to my outline here and there and in about 10 minutes I was able to complete something which would've taken hours otherwise, I used the same process for the can.

I then imported the after effects projects and an image from google and layered them on top of each other which gave me a rough draft. I then colour graded both bits of footage to match them and create some depth. I then used keyframing to resize and change positions of the can to match his hand movements. Another step I took was to use blur to create the illusion of focus and the can going in and out focus depending on its distance from the lens.

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My Reflection:

After completing this project I taught myself a lesson on lighting backgrounds properly when using green screen or blue screen in this case. The difference in shades caused by the lighting from different distances, directions and shadows being casted made the process a lot harder than it had to be and thinking of this beforehand in future projects will streamline the process and lead to a higher quality end-product.

Learning and experimenting with the rotobrush in After Effects is something I am glad I was Able to experience and from what I have seen of it so far it can be a great tool especially when it comes to projects that involve using already made content for example a lot of editing for short format social media such as TikTok, Instagram reels and YouTube shorts involves recutting 16:9 to 9:16 video and creating short versions of videos and in situations like this if you needed to cut something out the rotobrush tool would be a very efficient way of doing so.

This type of content is rapidly growing especially when it comes to marketing using social media and there are endless possibilities and I would like to try out different stuff and improving my technique as well as coming up with unique ideas for products or advertisers. This was quickly done and was more a proof of concept rather the actual type of video I would create for a client and the type of content goes in line with a previous project of mine, the mock coffee commercial. This is something I will try recreate in the future but have some planning and come up with an interesting idea to use!

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