Today we wanted to create a new view out of a window by replacing the original view with one that we had created. So, the first thing to do was to shoot a small piece of footage to use in the tutorial. We shot this in the training room. The view outside the window was quite bright so it would be easy to matte. This is the footage we shot.
The first thing we had to do was to create a mask for the footage. It wasn’t just a still image, so we had to make sure that we were masked out well when we walked across the window. First of all, we created an alpha matte using after effects. This was just a black box drawn around the shape of the window. We could have done this using a mask within after effects, but found it easier to do it this way. The idea was to create our own alpha channel that we could apply to the layer itself. When we had imported the alpha channel for the window, we only had to worry about the area of the footage where we walked across the window. We used a variety of effects to create a black and white silhouetted image of us walking across the window. We used levels, blurs, an thresholds to create this effects. Here is the extracted matte we pulled from the footage.
We placed this image over the original footage and set it as an Luma matte to make the window transparent.
The next thing to do was create the background to put into the footage. We decided to create a futuristic landscape with skyscrapers poking out of clouds. The first thing we did was find a suitable image of a skyscraper and cut around them using the mask tool. We ten separated the buildings onto separate layers so we had individual control of them. Next we got a picture of a sky and placed it behind the buildings. We then found a picture of some clouds and keyed out the blue from the sky so we could overlay them onto the building. Next we used the “tritone” effect on the sky, buildings and clouds to give everything an orange/golden colour. We thought this worked well with the futuristic elements of the image. We tried out various other effects such as brightness and contrasts on the whole composition to make it look darker and more stylistic.
Next we added some fractal noise and some CC Rain over the composition to simulate some simple weather effects. Here is the finished result.
We then simply added the background we’d created to the footage. We scaled it and positioned it so it looked realistic. We also added the same tritone effect to the original footage.
We realised that the matte we’d created wasnt quite right, so we added a matte choker to trim away the edge of the matte. For an extra, we decided to apply a small zoom and rotation to the composition using a simple camera and by making the layers 3D. Here is our final result.
