Nuke Editing

After finishing all of the backgrounds it was time to start working on post-production and colour correcting all the scenes. I decided to colour correct each scene individually as they are all set at a different time of day it didn't necessarily all have to match together and it was more important to make sure that each shot and scene is colour corrected right rather than the who film.

In our previous sweatbox session, we were given feedback where people felt that the smudges on the foreground layer as well as the unstable frames were a problem. This is why I decided to try and do a quick rota around the shot I was colour correcting in order to see if it will make it look any better. After doing so, the shot was a lot more stabilised and the smudges were gone. However, I did feel like the smudges helped to give the film a more painted style where you could definitely tell that every frame was hand painted but most people agreed that it looked better without the smudges. After receiving this feedback I then continued to go through the different shots and roto them out.

I did also come across a few problems with the rota, however. Firstly, most of the shots that I need to do were quite difficult as animation either changed quite drastically or there were holes that I needed to treat as separate rotas. I also had to play around with the feathering tool as doing it close to the object I was rotoing gave a cutout effect compared to the background and it looked quite out of place. However, using the feathering tool also meant that you could see a little bit of the background in the original video as the beauty shot didn't really match.  

I then tried to use grading alongside with colour correction in order to try and match the original image to the different beauty shot that we had. Even doing so however, I was still unable to completely match the colours together. The main reason for that was because I had the foreground image and the background image on the same layer thus not allowing me to use only the foreground/background image only. After going through this process, I realised that if we actually green screened all of the foreground layers would have benefited us in a lot of ways. I would have been able to get rid of the smudges without needing to roto them out and I would have also been able to stabilize the shot as the background would be one still image. Also if we used a green screen we wouldn't have needed the backgrounds before to animate the characters on the foreground which would have allowed and saved me more time as, as soon as I have finished painting them I could have worked on the post production or on any other things that needed to be done.