60s Sunset

This project and its associated midterm started as a midterm with the intentions of transforming a single frame of an image. In my free time, I chose to make it work in motion.

Firstly, I took my one frame of paint and first improved on it for every area I could, in which I greatly improved upon my ability to discern patterns of objects and how their light level differentiates between depth, verticality, and otherwise. This was primarily to eliminate wires, but with that I needed to eliminate the connected poles, as well as a large cell tower in the original plate's treeline. I then tracked every piece of it into the scene. Separating trackers by depth and relative motion, I made 18 distinctions of different pieces of rotopaint that I would separate and track using primarily 2 point trackers.

To set the scene more of a fall setting, I used a combination of hueshifts, huecorrections, color grades/corrections, and the HSV tool. This brought the vegetation more towards yellow, but in order to achieve a subtle variety in the colors of the trees, I handpainted specific areas of the background treeline that I then used to power a slightly different grade. The furthest mountain and trees required an additional separation and grade.

Using a grass and dirt texture, I layered them accordingly and used distortion and erosion to reveal the dirt at the edges, as well as layering atop a baseball field's dirt texture, and drawing rotoshapes of paths eroded by car wheels to reveal the dirt below, which was piped back in and offset to create a subtle graded shadow.

I performed a sky replacement using a very drastic image, and to allow this to blend in better I did the necessary color corrections, as well as utilizing Foundry's available machine learning tools. I generated a depth map of the entire scene using MiDaS from the open source library Cattery, and used that to power a depth-appropriate level of haze throughout the scene. To allow my character to enter over the replaced sky, I trained a local model on 10 examples of individual roto shapes I created of the man using CopyCat. Finally, I experimented with volume rays to add an additional sense of drama to the scene.

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