Compositing

With all the shots rendered, I had to composite them together in After Effects CS3. I had to use several compositions composed to several layers of rendered images, Photoshop files and other visual effects from the software, such as fractal noise to create mist/smoke to make the scenes more interesting.

Since the format for the movie is in HD 1080, I altered the composition settings for each shot, also changing the frame rate to 24 per second and the pixel aspect ratio to square pixels as that fitted better with the screen size.

To have a bird flying away at the end of the movie, I decided to do some 3D compositing and animation in After Effects to achieve this. I manipulated several photos of a robin and pigeon in Photoshop and then I imported the images into a composition and converted them into 3D layers.

I changed the anchor point for each of the wing images so that when I changed the 3D rotation, it would rotate from the pivot at the bottom of the wing. When i set the keyframes for the wings, I assigned an expression to the position and rotation controls so that the key frames would loop over and over to save me from applying keyframes throughout the entire composition. To make it look better, I enabled the Motion Blur control so that when the wings flapped quickly, they were a blur instead of looking too sharp and unrealistic.

Shot of the bird in 3D manipulation mode. Aside from changing the position of the wings, I have to use the puppet tool on the main body of the robin as well to distort it slightly so that it would look better.

Once the robin has been animated and rendered, I put the movie clip into the composition where the little girl is supposed to watch the robin fly around her and off into the distance. Once again, I converted the file into a 3D layer and used key frames to change the position and orientation of the bird to give it a flying pattern. Had to sync it up with the amount of time it takes for the little girl to look in a certain direction.

Shot of the little girl walking down the street. Used a 3D camera asset and applied of layer of fractal noise resembling mist to make the scene more gloomier.

Shot of the little girl and the air warden. Once again, I converted the layers into 3D and used a 3D camera to alter the shot a bit more and to zoom in on the little girl at the end of the shot.

This was a difficult shot to composite because the street view of the cathedral and the buildings were in one layer and the barrage balloons shown above were in a separate layer. The barrage balloons had not been rendered with the cathedral so I had to 3D composite them in and change the position of the image every single frame to make it fit. At first it didn’t work with just several key frames so I had to set a key frame every single frame. It was time consuming and a bit hard to make everything fit but eventually I managed to get the shot to work.

After every shot was composited in After Effects, I had to pre-render each one individually. Due to the complexity of the compositions as well as the HD 1080 settings, the maximum amount of time it took to render one shot was up to 50 minutes, this was recorded due to the last shot being approximately 14 seconds long and containing up to layers.

All shots are now rendered and are ready to be edited together. If there is anything missing or a certain shot does not look quite right, then I may have to go back to After Effects, change the shot and then render it again.