Piecing it all Together

After a couple of months of sickness, I'm finally making significant progress towards completing the first episode of City KREW. About 75% of the animations are complete and 25% of the final compositions are complete, visually at least.

Compositing the scenes can be quite tricky, so here's a run down of how I'm tackling it. The Lego stop motion animations will be superimposed over real life backgrounds. The first step was to record the backgrounds, then I need to set up the stop motion shot to match the scale and perspective as closely as possible. Depending on the shot, this can be very difficult. The screenshots below show a relatively simple shot.

The real life background looks fine on its own, but when I think about having characters in the foreground, the depth of field is too great.

Luckily this is a simple fix. I simply copied the background and created a feathered mask that shows the trees that would appear behind the characters. Adding a Fast Blur gives the desired effect.

Next comes the stop motion. Using the real life background, I set up a grid on the computer that matches the camera's viewfinder grid. This allows me to match the position and scale I need for the stop motion to fit into the live background. Shooting against a green screen allows me to quickly extract the characters using a key and insert them into the background.

Unfortunately, it's not a completely smooth process. Since the characters are walking on the baseplate, the studs create enough  reflection and variation in colour that the key cannot effectively remove them. This means manually masking them out of every frame which is very tedious and time-consuming. Fortunately, because the Lego figures have all straight edges, the masks do not need to be complex. I would not want to be doing this with real actors!

Once the key is applied, the final shot looks like this. There are a few other adjustments I make depending on the background. For this, the contrast is reduced and the brightness increased for the Lego characters to try and match the lighting of the woods.

After doing about twelve of these scenes, I've really perfected my technique. Once the other animations are complete, I think I will be able to blow through the comps. When they are complete, all that remains is adding the voiceovers and other audio.