Boom's in shot

When I agreed to do VFX on the film I thought there would be 2 shots to do - the crazy mirror scene, and the crazy powder drop scene - this changed quickly.

Crazy powder drop scene never happened, there wasn't enough time and we just didn't film with effect in mind which would have made the entire thing a lot harder. But the crazy mirror shot? We had 3 attempts at this shot before the final try, 2 with me and 1 on the second day of shooting because we were ahead of schedule. Now our dancer was wearing green so common sense meant we had to use a blue screen, right? I mean, what can go wrong? Somehow the natural lighting from the location made the blue section of the RGB pixels in her hair the exact same hue of blue as our blue screen - something we couldn't notice until we go into post and tried to key out the screen, and ended up with a clean key of the mirror but also her hair was missing alongside it.

I worked on fixing it with Phil and tried a lot of different keys to try and fix it, changing saturation to get more of a difference before keying it out, using multiple keys at the same time to make a difference. When my last resort was rotoscoping a friend offered to try his hand at fixing it - he got the shots to match up but the blue screen was still a mystery to him so I have the project file with me, it's just a case of cleaning it. Tomorrow I'm going to be rotoscoping a lot - or I may find a solution on adobe.com, We'll soon find out.

Now you see him

Now you don't

One of my jobs was also cleaning up the shots - in some shots you can see people in mirrors, it was destined to happen at some point and my general threat on set was 'if you're in shot, you VFX yourself out'. But when it's the boom in shot, you've just got to deal with it. I spent today masking it out and trying to fill it with something similar, frame-by-frame, as the shot in question is not only a moving shot it's a shot in which the camera was dutch and returned horizontal meaning tracking wasn't the easiest either. I ended up tracking it manually rotating and moving a cover up as and when needed - hopefully you can't see it. When we take this film into festivals and I've had more time to work on it I'll have taken out the fire exit signs, the plugs and anything that ruins the overall aesthetic of the film.

Also update we got the VFX mirror shot working! It took a lot of masking (from Phil, I had seen enough of masks today) but we got it working and now it's in our final edit.