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Evaluation

When we first got the brief for Tracking 2, I was stressed because I feel like my first tracking project was just okay and the track was kind of really bad so I knew this one had to be a thousand times better. So I felt kind of pressured. But I decided to make sure I really focus on the tracking aspect and make sure it’s really done well even if it’s just a small part so that I will get good technical marks at least. I then thought if I’m only doing one tracking part I should make kind of a story around it. Before we were even given the brief I knew I wanted to develop my style more and I feel like I have achieved that with this brief. I like when VFX blends in the most, when you don’t even notice it so I think I might be working on things like clean-up in the future. I decided quite early on that I wanted to use the FaceTracker in Nuke mainly because I really wanted to build up my experience in Nuke and it was a new plug in I wanted to try out. I realised later this was probably a bad idea as only Tom knew how to actually use it so I had to wait for him to be in a lot.

I do like the final video, there could be a lot more tracking involved as I planned to do more such as clean up however I ran out of time. I like the style of it and the meaning behind it as the ‘real world’ is a different colour grade and the ‘dream world’ is more like an old vintage film. There’s a lot of subtle things I put in that I don’t think anyone will notice. Such as the fact that the lighting kind of alters and he kind of wakes up at night time and also the blinds in the middle of it are to kind of hint to the viewer that the dream is mixing up with the real world. I like the blurred edges to suggest a dream state it gives quite a comforting feeling. My favourite shot is the end shot, the whole idea of the video came about because I wanted to do that shot because I thought it would be nice to summarise the video showing he has a face just by seeing his eyelashes. I think it achieves the vintage-y look I was going for, I think the 14fps helps with this a lot.

I didn’t like that the facetrack didn’t completely work so I had to add in kind of an awkward cut in to his face. But even Tom couldn’t figure out how to fix it so I don’t know how I would. The actual track is nice like it is tracked well to his face it’s just the actual model kind of messed up. Another thing I could improve on is how the clean up on his face also isn’t great, I could’ve spent more time on this but obviously I ran out of time, it makes me cringe every time but I don’t think people really notice unless you pause the video.

This tracking project was really fun and I learnt a lot from using Nuke. Even if it was just how to work my way around it, I think I’ve definitely improved. I think the overall video is okay the style is nice, the track could’ve been a lot better and also maybe even the transition into the real life could be better. I really like the opening and closing shot, think they look really nice. I’m going to send it off to Peter Oppersdorff (the guy from my professional practice) to perhaps get his feedback on it as he’s really good with creating a filmic look.

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FINAL NODE GRAPH

This was really helped along by Tom. I have got a much more thorough understanding of Nuke from this project and I’m really glad I could go through it in detail with help. Proud of how this turned out.

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Breakdown Video

This is the breakdown video, it’s very short but it has everything I did in it.

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Final Draft

I like how it looks with the slowed down end. Pretty happy with it. There isn’t a lot of tracking to be fair but the tracking that is in it was SO hard and took me a while. I’ve definitely learnt a lot during this process especially in Nuke and so my tracking skills have improved.

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Draft2

This is my second draft. I feel like you don’t see enough of the end so I’m going to make it longer in the next one by slowing it down.

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Draft1

This is my first draft including the rendered nuke file. 

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I also removed his eyelashes and eyebrow from the start of the video so it kind of hints to the audience that he hasn’t got a face without being too obvious.

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This was my process for a while so I was clone stamping the wall so that you can’t see the marker on the side of his face as he turns.

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I noticed at the end he moves back again so the marker is revealed. I had to cover this up by adjusting the roto spline.

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It took me a while to cut out the hand and add a shadow in and it looks okay. Could be better but I haven’t got enough time to refine as I couldn’t figure out how to mask the hand out so I had to just move the mask.

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So I’ve got to here and honestly it doesn’t look as bad as I thought it did. Obviously there’s a few things that slip off so I’ll just retrack those now, hopefully I can crop it in the edit.

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I had to make a new clean plate for his cheek because it turns so side on. I did this in Photoshop then brought it into Nuke.

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This is my node graph so far for roto-ing out the markers on Ciarans face. Tom has been a huge help in helping me organise everything neatly and showing me how to do certain things by showing me what each node does. This part was helped along by Marius though as Tom wasn’t in one day so I asked Marius for help. I could’ve probably done it with the face tracker but I guess it’s good to practice other methods of clean-up.

This is so hard.

I’m trying to grade it so it blends in but obviously the shadows move everywhere and I don’t know how to mask a grade in Nuke so it looks a bit off. Also his face moves so much i have to adjust the spline a lot which kind of makes the patches obvious. 

I’m running out of time so might have to use some editing tricks to dodge around the parts that mess up.

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This is the Nuke node graph I’ve got so far. I’ve tried to reduce the amount of keyframes so that the program will naturally work it out for itself. I found when I added too many keyframes it looked too random and jittered around so I just removed some. I think it looks more natural.

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Removing tracking markers from his face in Photoshop using the patch tool.

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This no joke took me like way too long to do. Marius showed me how to do it in Nuke thank god. So I can start doing some Nuke things before Tom gets back from his honeymoon. I’m going to remove the tracking markers on his face using one point tracking and attach the roto from Photoshop onto his face.

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Clone stamped the green tracking markers and the cable underneath the tv.