Breakdown Paintout Shot

Ever since I saw this plate by Yarolav Suraev I really liked the idea of making a paintout of the woman with the challenging aspect of keeping all its movement - as well in the ocean as in the fire and its reflections. I also loved the smaller details in this shot like the lens flare, the flying embers and the decent heat distortion.

Layering

Approaching this paintout, it was crucial to keep all the layers I would need in mind. Therefore, I began with the layer furthest back: the sky. Tracking this element wasn´t easy already, mainly due to the lack of information about the camera used. After some attempts, my clean plate ended up sticking fairly good. The only remaining task was to adjust the grading to accommodate the color changes of the sky within the sequence.

Moving on to the ocean layer, I also started with tracking in my clean patch, which was limited by a rough roto of the woman, just as I did for the previous patch. However, to avoid any issues with the ocean's movement in itself, I ended up making the patch larger, covering the entire area the woman traverses throughout the sequence. To get this clean patch, I made a cutout of the ocean that was completely free of the woman and stacked a few of these cutouts above and next to each other, keeping in mind to later on bring back the highlights and colors caused by the reflections of the sky.

Next up was the ground patch, which presented the biggest tracking challenge. I got rid of most of its problems by combining the CornerPins of two different Trackers and animating a Dissolve between the StMaps of these two movements. To maintain the fire movement, I extracted a part of the fire from a sequence where the woman doesn´t walk by and retimed it a few times to work over the entire frame range. At some point, I also decided for making an extra patch for the bottle itself, to get rid of any bending issues caused by the tracking. I also reintroduced the original flickering of the plate, by analyzing it with the CurveTool and using its outcome as an expression in my grade node.

Moving forward, I tackled the car patch, where the reflection of the fire also needed to be added as a retimed patch. This patch was stabilized and later on matchmoved again to fit over the plate.

Details

The last things to match the original plate even better involved painting back in the moving embers, adding the lens flare back on by using individually graded and animated rotos for each element, and recreating the heat distortion.