After I finished tracking, I started to rotoscope. To do this I had to pre-compose the scene that I had just tracked, so pre-composing all of my HUD elements into one comp. By doing this it makes the HUD elements that are all 3D into 2D layers where I can rotoscope around Sici, Paul or objects.
Mask not applied yet. Shot is alright as it is as she has not turned her head round to the screens.
Mask waiting to be animated and to hide the HUD elements when she turns her head back to the screens.
Mask applied and moving around with her head to hide the HUD elements that are covered by her head.
After I finished creating the HUD’s to the design that my director wanted, I then started on the task of tracking the HUD’s which to me is quite a difficult task and a challenging one at that as the actress and the actor move their heads around a lot. I had to try to keep up with their head movements and make sure the motions would be smooth and swift, not snapping up or down. To do this, I had to hand track each shot with a Null objects. I could have used After Effects Tracker, however it is not the best. Especially when the actor or actress turns their head as it will not follow the motion so hand tracking was the way forward.
To do this, I had to use her eyes as my reference points throughout the entire scene so I placed the Null at the ends of her eyes and hand tracked her position as she moved towards the camera as you can see with the red path.
After I finished tracking her, I would place the HUD elements into the shot but instead of tracking all the HUD elements all over again,
I would instead use expressions and tell each HUD elements to follow the certain parts that I tracked. In this instance, I told the Human HUD element’s position, X & Y rotations to follow the position, X & Y rotations of the Null.
Then adding a transform effect on top of the Human element to then position the HUD element where I would want it in shot.
In this video I show the process I took to get my HUD items tracked and placed where I wanted them. Also, what the final shot looked like after I had finished it.
