Final Project - WIP12

Oh joy joy joy joy!!!!  I finally found a way to fix my masking problem and now the newspapers fly out of the bin properly.  After approximately 3 weeks and countless attempts and various methods, I was still unable to mask it in such a way that would make it seem like newspapers fly out of the bin properly.

My problem was that in AE, the bin had to be both on a layer that was in front of the hidden sheets of newspapers, yet also be on a layer that was behind the sheets of newspapers because as the newspapers fly out, they would cover parts of the bin.  I tried everything I knew from using travelling mattes, to painstakingly masking it frame by frame, to turning "primary visibility" off and trying to animate "visibility" of the individual sheets but none of it was satisfactory.

I'm not sure how apparent it was to you guys when you watched the previous renders but I knew that although I was able to get it kind-of sort-of in the render I handed in that Friday, it was still unacceptable both to me and I'm sure to anyone who does vfx.  I spent hours on Sunday night attempting to fix my problem when I finally found the solution on the internet.  I don't know why I didn't see this solution earlier but this solution was exactly what I needed and I am SOOOOO happy it works.  If only I had known about this earlier, it would have saved me so much time.... but I'm still really happy that I found it and am really happy that I learnt something again. :)

The solution to my problem came from this website:
http://www.onoff.ch/2008/06/21/using-the-black-hole/

All fellow friends who use Maya and AE, now do you understand why I say that that was really, really simple compared to all the methods I attempted in the last 3 weeks? =)

When I have the time, I think I would like to write in greater detail about this in another post so that I don't forget why I had to do this and how to do this again if I needed to do it again.

After improving on the rotoscope and using the new method on the newspapers, Shot 1 is pretty much good to go except for 2 things.  I still feel I can improve how I cleaned up the 3 markers on the left wall.   Actually, I think it kind of sucks right now even though I did spend quite a bit of time on it.  So today, I will take a different approach and see if that works better.  And the other thing I need to do is to fix color correction which I will get to hopefully by the end of today.

Oh... and here is the latest render of Shot 1, enjoy. =)

p.s. For some reason youtube is giving me problems, so I will use blogger video even though I prefer youtube.  Will probably replace the video later when youtube works for me again.
UPDATE - replaced with the youtube vid.