BBC Live Brief - Derek Cooper Award

As part of my live brief for the BBC Food and Farming Awards, I delved further into editing within After Effects, looking at colour grading, keying and editing video footage. When my team and I had finished shooting all the stop-motion animated shorts, I took it upon myself to start the editing process to make them all look polished and professional and have a coherent style.

I began working on the Derek Cooper Lifetime Achievement Award to start with. The original video looked like this:

As you can see the whole shot looks quite bland and the green screen in the background has a bright reflection onto everything else in the scene. This looked very unprofessional and it would have been easier to fix by playing with the lighting when we were shooting the animation in the green screen studio. However this gave me a chance to put my editing skills to use to see if I could remove this reflection digitally.

Firstly I removed the green screen on every shot using a built in plugin for After Effects called KeyLight. This is screen shot of the settings I used to get the perfect balance and a view of the screen matte which shows black areas (see through) and white areas (solid):

The screen matte allowed me to tweak the settings until the entire area I needed to be transparent (the green screen) was black and everything else was white. This was hard to perfect as the green reflection from the screen caused issues with the solid areas, parts with a bright green reflection became semi-transparent so it was a matter of tweaking the settings until the balance between black and white areas was almost exactly right.

I then put an appropriate image in the background in place of the green screen:

In one scene we shot the animation backwards to make it easier when animating. I figured out a way in After Effects to reverse the footage, an effect called time reverse layer:

Next I edited the video footage into roughly 20 seconds so it synced correctly with the audio we were going to use over the top of it. I used a mix of the other animation shorts we had created and picked the best few seconds of each to have in between the typewriter sequences. I cut these down and edited them into the scene so it all flowed smoothly:

Once I had all the timing and order sorted out I began to work on colour correction and visual enhancements to make it more pleasing to the eye.  

First I added a simple vignette onto an adjustment layer which creates a shadow around the edges of the screen; this focuses and draws your eye to the middle of the screen where the action takes place. It doesn’t obscure the background it just makes it stand out less so the scene is not as busy and distracting:

Next I added some colour correction and skin softening effects to reduce the levels of the green reflection. This makes the scene look much more natural and realistic compared to before:

With a few more effects and colour correction techniques I achieved this final result:

Some of the effects and settings I used:

As you can see from this still of the original video my editing has completely transformed the scene into something much more moody and visually pleasing:

The final animation can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR4IbvT29ko