Editing the First Scene (Masking, Masking, and More Masking)

 

After a few days of slacking off, I decided to get to work on editing the first scene. I didn't expect it to be too much work and was looking forward to finding out how I was going to achieve the cloning effect the short film will rely on. Before I got to the few seconds that the dark figure was on screen, I found out that I may need to reshoot some parts of the first scene. The reasons why varied for each shot. The shot of me walking back to my desk with the plate of food was out of focus. The shot of me walking into the camera/toward my door was unusable due to the laptop I was pretending to be working on going into sleep mode. Despite a few of my shots being unusable, I was able to piece together enough footage to make up the first scene up until the parts with the dark figure. When thinking of ways to create my cloning effect, I decided to mask out my character and to add him into the shot. The problem with this was that I ended up having to go frame by frame adjusting the masking path so that my character was cut smoothly. This has been a grueling editing process.

The period of time that the dark figure appears is only 2 seconds. This doesn't sound too bad, but it gets worse when you factor in how many frames are in those 2 seconds. In those 2 seconds alone, there are more than 50 frames. This means that I have to make or manage the masking paths of 50+ frames. I appreciate the time to myself, but this was more than enough. While going through each frame, a few problems presented themselves. One of them being the shadow I casted on the wall. The way I was masking out my character, excluded anything else in the scene but him. This included the wall next to me and the shadow I casted on it. The other problem was my door. On my door, there were 2 jackets on a towel hanging there. One of those jackets is a part of the dark figure's costume, meaning that it isn't hanging on the door during the 2 seconds he's in frame. This means that my character's moving in front of the door will make the mask look awkward. A solution that I have for both of these problems is to finish masking out the main character, then to mask out the wall and door as well. Hopefully it works, I'm tired of masking things out.