Welcome to entry two in the Making of Corporal Faith! Here we will discuss a fairly small effect and one that is very unlikely to be noticed in the final movie, unless you know it's there. This is the re-coloring of a helicopter. Here's the story. We needed a shot of a military, double bladed helicopter flying over the ocean. What we had to work with was some very shaky footage of a double-bladed, military rescue helicopter flying over the water. The problem here, for those of you that don't know, rescue helicopters are bright orange. This obviously wouldn't work for the shot that we needed, unless we could do some digital manipulations. That, of course, is what we did. Otherwise this page would be very short. So here we go:

Here is a still of the original footage that we had to work with. Besides the color, it looks like a pretty good shot. But there is a problem lurking that you can't see here - shakiness. The camera was on a boat and tended to bob and weave a lot. So we have two things to take care of - color and camera movement.

Color was the tackled first. The clip was dropped into After Effects and the orange on the helicopter was keyed out. This is easier said than done. Three color keys had to be used to take out the orange. Below is an image with the transparent areas shown in green. As you can see, even this wasn't perfect. Some of the water and bits of cloud got keyed out as well. We'll fix this problem later.

Next comes the color correction. The idea here is to put a copy of the helicopter layer (without the chroma-key) underneath and change that layer to make the orange become a nice, Army green. This layer will show through wherever the top layer has been keyed out. Here is a still of that layer. There is another aspect of this layer that I should mention. Notice that the helicopter has a square spline drawn around it. This is a spill-matte. Another copy of the helicopter layer will be placed under this one (without any masks or effects). That way, any unwanted holes in the top layer will only show through to the bottom layer, not the middle, color distorted layer. Only the area of the scene with the orange will have the color corrected version under it. I hope you followed that. I can't think of a better way of putting it.

Here is a screen shot of the composition up till now. The helicopter is nice and green. Notice the spill matte around the helicopter.

Well, that's not all. The story is only half sung. The whole video clip needs to be stabilized. For those unfamiliar with this term, it means that the view camera movement needs to be smoothed out. To do this, a very large composition was created (about 900 by 600). Tracking was then used to stabilize the image. Basically, I told the tracker to hold the mountains still, no matter where the camera view moved.  The problem is that the view slides all over the place, hence the need for the big composition. Here is a shot of the composition window. As you can see, the video clip has danced it's way toward the right side of the composition.

Now for the final step! We can't stay with a little video clip shaking in a black abyss. It needs to be cropped back down to the standard 720x480. This is how that was done. This composition was nestled into another, smaller composition  and positioned correctly. Or, in other words, it became a clip in a new composition. The problem now is that whenever the image shifts, black edges will show around it. In fact, the whole thing would eventually leave the screen. So the clip was enlarged and animated to stay in the view. Some of the wavy motion of the camera had to be animated back into the clip, but not all of it. Here is an image of the scene after its been cropped. Notice the motion path that was assigned to keep it in the shot.

That's pretty much it folks! Here is a still from the final, color adjusted clip.   If you enjoyed this making installment, leave feedback! If you didn't like it, then leave feedback anyway!