From the course: Creating a Short Film: 09 VFX Environments

Combining takes for the best performance

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 09 VFX Environments

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Combining takes for the best performance

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- [Instructor] In this chapter we're going to get a big overview of a bunch of really important foundational visual effects concepts. Kind of dig a little bit more into those and just to kind of like wet your whistle and to just kind of do like a warm up stretch for this chapter we're going to talk about this concept of combining takes for the best possible performance. You know, I thought about putting this in the editing course 'cause it really deals with picking the best acting take which was more of an editing thing and also the more I think about it, the more I probably should have done that. But here we are and we're going to talk about combining different takes. So I have this really good example here in this shot where Ta'ani shushes Korda'a as she's about to reel her magic. This is kind of like where things kind of slow down and get kind of stylized and stuff like that. And the music gets all cool and so like that. And so Ta'ani leans in and I love this performance of Nadi here as Korda'a on the right and her eyes are wide and she's super intense and she actually in the moment is kind of mesmerized by what Eva Jane is doing here. And then Eva, though, does some kind of weird thing with her fingers right there and then she turns and has a question and she doesn't back out of the frame right. So it's a really good take for Korda'a. Not the best take for Eva. But as we go later they do it again in the same shot and here Eva leans in to the shush again and here Nadi is just, she's over it. She's already checked out and she looks sedated but then Eva, as she pulls away, that's a really good take. That's a really awesome, she moves out of the frame really great. So I want Nadi from the first take and Eva from the second take. And this is a really common trick used all the time by actors especially David Fincher's famous for doing this all the time. So what I want to do is I want to go to a spot between the two takes and I want to split the layer. And I can do that by holding Command + Shift + D on the Mac or Control+ Shift + D on the PC. And that splits the layer there. And this is the good take that we want from Korda'a so I'm going to select this layer. Hit Enter and just type Korda'a. It's kind of a wacky spelling so you don't have to do that if you don't want. You can name it whatever you want. Little girl or whatever. I'm going to press Enter here on the top layer. I'm going to call this Ta'ani. Now I want to move this take over the top here so they overlap. And what I think I might want to do is actually select this top layer, press the letter T for Opacity, turn that down a little bit so we can see the top layer kind of superimpose and then we could drag that into place. So we could kind of make the top layer kind of match the bottom layer. And actually what I might want to do is find a spot where the bottom, there we go. And then make these match up like so just to kind of get them, timing-wise, in the same spot, took the opacity back up to 100% and close that up again. And now what we want to do is make a mask around Ta'ani. So I'm going to select the pen tool. I'm going to uncheck Rotobezier. I'm going to use my middle mouse wheel to kind of zoom out a little bit here. And then I'll make a mask that kind of goes around and tries to not touch either actress but completely encompasses all of Eva. There we go. And now that's all that I really need to do. I don't need to necessarily do anything to the bottom layer because the bottom layer is obscured. Like the Ta'ani take is obscured by the Ta'ani take on the top so we're good there. I'm going to go back to my selection tool here. And we might want to feather that edge just a little bit. I'm going to select this top layer. Press the letter F on my keyboard. Maybe we just give that, I don't want to give it too much but somewhere around there. Somewhere around 20. And that looks pretty good. So now, if we scrub this, we have the best of Ta'ani and the best of Korda'a in the same take. And this is actually what I did for this very same moment in The Assurance. So again the key here is that you're trying to get the best moments from each take from each actor even if it's not in the same shot or the same take. So now that we got that little appetizer out of the way we're going to move onto the heavy stuff, the heavy lifting of this chapter and talk about a really foundational visual effects technique and that's tracking motion in footage.

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