Once you have your track, you can comp in literally anything you can model. I decided to go back to my youth and create some 80's inspired graphics, with a modern finish. During the process, I didn't know exactly what I would comp into the shot, only that I wanted it to have my name, so I could put it at the start of my new demo reel.
So I found some tutorials online, asked some friends for tips, taught myself motion tracking and went to it! Here is the workflow I used to create this piece.
1. Took the Sony Z7 for a walk around Broadway. Strange how my favorite shot turned out to be a back alley near some dumpsters!
2. Brought the footage into the tracking software, and performed a simple auto track. After applying lens distortion, the track was solved.
3. Once I had the track I brought the data into Cinema 4D. At this point I still had no idea exactly what I would comp into the footage, so I just started to play :) What came about what some slick 80's style shapes and colors
4. Re-created a simple scene with walls, floor, and a cube to represent the dumpster. (I needed shapes to cast shadows on)
5. A friend of mine challenged me to include some glowing objects and lights that would interact with the background. So I added the glowing spheres and cubes
6. Rendered the scene with an alpha channel, then rendered separate passes for lights and shadows. They were rendered out with global illumination, except for the shadow pass. Normally I really like the shadows created by global illumination, but it was giving me problems by creating TOO many shadows in the scene. So instead, I set the lights to create area shadows, then blurred the shadow pass in AE. Then I applied some curves to this layer to punch it up a bit, and it ended up looking better than the GI shadows (and rendered faster too!)
7. At this point I comped all the layers together in AE, applied my final color correction, and clicked RENDER! You can watch my demo reel by clicking here.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it! Please leave a comment below!
