The scroll is really the centerpiece of the film - it falls from the sky at the beginning and functions as a guide throughout the rest of the film. Most of the time it is just a rolled up, normal scroll. But when it is opened, it reveals a glowy arrow that always points toward the light in the sky (even when clouds obscure it).

We probably spent more effort on the scroll than any other prop. It was created out of two sheets of poster board, thin cardboard, spray-glue, really thick coffee, and a little spray paint. The end effect was quite pleasing and worked great for the normal shots, but what about when it was opened? Well, it was decided to tack on green track points and worry about that in post-production.

Here was the resulting, rather lengthy post-production process for the first-to-be-completed scroll shot!

Thank goodness for the trackpoints! Who knows how things would've turned out without them! With the trackpoints, it was possible to do a four-point corner track which automatically distorts a layer to stick to the surface of an object. This would have been nigh impossible without a clean square marked out on the scroll. Even so, the results were far from perfect. The scroll is unrolled and re-re-rolled, both of which required a lot of manual tracking. Also, the lower right track point was rarely in the shot (usually it was hidden by the bag Matt was holding). And, when Matt turns, most of the other trackpoints were also obscured for a little while. Hours were spent trying to estimate where the trackpoints should be and animating them to stay with the scroll.

There was a worrisome drawback to using trackpoints, especially such big ones - the trackpoints would have to be erased later. This was done with chroma-key. Several shades of green were selected and isolated on another layer. Then they were desaturated and hue-shifted until they blended with the scroll. The result was almost seamless as you can see in the next screenshot and, after the final coloring, the trackpoints couldn't be seen at all.

The shot was taken from on top of a ladder, which made the camera awkward to control. The shadow of the camera snuck into the shot a couple of times. This could've been fixed easiest by cropping the shot, but that would reduce the quality and cramp the shot, so a more tricky method was used. A still was brought out to Photoshop and, with the very handy Healing Brush, the offending camera was removed. Then the still was put back into AE and used to patch over the shadow. With the help of the tracker, it matched perfectly.

Next was the arrow. The arrow could've been made in Photoshop, but making it with a mask in a separate composition left it easy to edit.

The arrow was added to the composition with the scroll and distorted with the four-point track data. A duplicate was also made and blurred to give the glowy appearance. The arrow had to be matted to keep it from floating on top of the bag and the scroll (especially important when the scroll is opened and closed. So the scroll was splined BY HAND for the entire 15 second shot. This was the single most time-consuming part of this shot. Whew, talk about hours and hours of "click, click, click!"

To add to the glow effect (and, perhaps, because matting is addictive), a matte was also animated onto Matt's face and the levels tweaked to make it appear that Matt's face is shining in the light of the arrow.

At this point, the overall color of the shot was introduced as well. This was the first crowd shot to be colorized, so much time was spent tweaking levels to get the right balance. It was made to be drab, low-contrasty and a bit sickly. The highlights are all reduced to make the arrow and light-in-the-sky stand out starkly in their pure whiteness.

Then there was a whole other aspect of the shot - adding the light beams shining from either end of the scroll. The one on the top was fairly straight forward because it was in the clear and could therefore be tracked. But the lower one was under Matt's arm most of the time which meant it had to be hand-tracked. Not only that, but Matt's arm, and a passing person, had to be matted to keep them on top of the beam. Thankfully, it was a relatively short part of the shot, only a few seconds (a few hundred frames).

Here is a comparison between the original footage and the finished composite. From video to movie!

Take a look at the Preview to see the completed effect in motion!