Practice: Compositing / Visual Effects: Helicopters
Personal Project: I have done this short compositing scene of helicopters flying past, with smoke and a raging fire for learning purposes. You can see the result and the different elements of the comp shown in the breakdown. The source I had was my own helicopter video footage. I tracked the camera motion to be able to add in the top left hovering helicopter footage I shot, using an animated mask. I also created a 2nd helicopter flying by (the one further away from the other one) by duplicating and masking again the original footage. I then also created a smoke effect using multiple layers and again tracked the motion using tracking from camera movement. Finally I did some further adjustments and tweaking, plus added the raging fire in the foreground and used Compound Blur to improve the realism of the fire further (The fire element shot is stock footage from Artbeats). For keying I used Keylight 1.2. I am studying After Effects studio techniques in preparation for (hopefully) future compositing work.