VFX: Day for Night

Hey everyone!  Back with another VFX update.

Now before I explain what I've done, check out this clip below:

Does it look like it was filmed in the night?  Well, this was actually a test to see how well I could pull off a "day for night" shot.  Yep, it was actually filmed in broad daylight.

Believe it or not, here's the original clip:

Crazy, right?  There are many ways to go about doing a day for night shot, but the quickest is just to apply some simple color corrections (notably reducing the brightness, and turning everything blue):

Unfortunately, I wasn't quite satisfied with the simple method above.  As you can see, the background is much too visible, especially the sky.

So I had to do some rotoscoping (you know... that super tedious process where you edit clips frame-by-frame) to separate my character from the background.  Here's the result (called a "matte"):

Luckily, because it's a night shot, I was able to do a rougher job of it and decrease the time it takes quite a bit.  And the final result looks just as good:

There's still a lot work to do with the rest of the day for night shots.  But luckily I believe this test was a success, and I think I can now pump out these shots in a reasonable amount of time.

As always, looking forward to posting more as I progress!

- Erik (Director)