Rotoscoping the main title

To make our opening stand out from all the others I decided to put the main title within the 3d space of the footage and have our main character run past it. To do this I adopted a process called rotoscoping. This is the process whereby you cut out portions of a clip in order to get an object or in our case text to become part of the scene. Many programmes have this feature but I decided to use Adobe After Effects.

My first challenge was making it look like the text was in the footage. I started with the empty footage and used the 3D camera tracker plugin to track points of contrast in the footage, once the plugin had finished it showed me with coloured markers where there were points of contrast that were visible for most of the scene as you can see above. I chose a few points and created a text layer which I parented to the tracker. I then manipulated it in 3D space to get it positioned correctly.

 Once I had completed the camera track I began the tedious process of rotoscoping. I had to rotoscope every frame when Dami was running over the title and its shadow so in total about 100 or so frames. After Effects does the rotoscope roughly for you but since Dami was running each frame was blurred which meant to get a detailed rotoscope I needed to zoom in and carefully trace around her in every frame. As you can see above the red highlights indicate what was to be cut out of the scene. The cut out footage was a duplicate of the original and once it was fully rotoscoped it was placed on top of the original footage and text layers.

With the original footage hidden you can see the effect start to take shape.