Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 27, 2018. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Steffen Hacker pulls off this feat with his debut film “Ingenium” and provides crucial tips for post-production. In the first part of the Ingenium series, he already reported on successfully handling the wild mix of formats using Adobe Premiere Pro CC and AfterEffects CC. Below, he now provides further practical tips on Morph Cuts and VFX shots. Incidentally, Creative Cloud with Premiere Pro CC and AfterEffects CC, as well as many other tools such as Photoshop CC, is still available at around 40% off until August 31 – at the special price of just €35.69/month.
Morph Cut
One particular feature was especially important in post-production: MorphCut. I shot a medium close-up of Esther in front of a green screen and then wanted to shorten a brief pause before a big reaction even further in order to maintain the pace of the scene. But how do you cut out half a second without inserting another reverse shot that only confuses the viewer?
What I would have had to spend ages experimenting with plug-ins to achieve in AfterEffects CC, MorphCut accomplished with just a few clicks – especially since the background was completely irrelevant for the shot because of the green screen, and the result was almost perfect. No one who did not already know beforehand would notice the morph transition in the face.
We took a similar approach with many other scenes throughout the film – usually as a result of cuts in the edit. Once you have shortened a scene to its minimum, you simply cannot compress it any further with the takes you have used on the timeline so far. This means you then start experimentally editing actors’ actions (at different times or from other takes) in parallel. To finally get these together in the same take, I had to stabilise one of the two shots with AfterEffects CC. In the past, this was a major effort, but today it is child’s play thanks to the Warp Stabilizer. Finally, all that remained was to link the footage to a 2D track of the second take and separate the two actors from each other with a soft mask.
Over 600 VFX Shots
But it did not stop at these small retouches, because the film has more than 600 VFX shots. As the following image examples show, however, many of them are invisible.
In this small overview, you can see police cars and police officers where there were none, church towers where none existed (to maintain scene continuity), or even entire sets in the background of a location. The reason was that there was no money for the corresponding set dressing. I was therefore glad that I could insert the objects into the scenes with AfterEffects CC.
The most important thing when inserting the 3D renderings is setting the black level using the Levels effect, to prevent the digitally inserted parts of the image from immediately standing out to the viewer. A little Light-Wrap then perfects the result.
At the end of the project, which took four years of shooting and a whole year of post-production, there was another special challenge: All the dialogue sections shot in Thailand in 2013 no longer fitted the film’s final story. So we had to reshoot the dialogue – without incurring the additional cost of another trip to Thailand.
The solution was to find enough “clean image areas” to restore the background behind Esther and thus “retouch her out” of each of the shots. We then recreated the lighting setup and repeated all the scenes in front of a green screen with new dialogue.
To make the compositing of the new shots more believable, I applied one final little trick to the overall footage by placing a disco-light flare over the upper part of the image in Premiere. I hope this behind-the-scenes look at the post-production and the trailer provide good insights into the project.
Ready for your own project? Until August 31, Adobe Creative Cloud, including Premiere Pro CC and AfterEffects CC, is available at the special price of just €35.69/month.
