Editing "The King Who Sought Immortality",

Now here's an old project I haven't talked about in a while. That's mostly because I've been deep into the gruelling task of trying to get good composites out of quite bad bluescreen shots. While filming this project the actors were placed in front of a pretty dark blue screen and lit with two stage lights. About half-way into the filming we managed to smash one of the lights, which considerable lessened the effect of the blue screen background. The resulting footage is full of background shadows, grainy imagery and other compositing horrors. The main problem has been achieving an edge around the actors that doesn't flicker.

So for almost a full year I've been trying to make the best out of the situation, using different ways of extracting keyed material and applying hand-drawn mattes (sigh!) The finished result varies wildly from scene to scene. Sometimes it's quite horrible, at other times not that bad. But I've been told that for an amateur production shot under the aformentioned circumstances with a DV camera, it's not that bad at all. It's just that I always pump up my ambitions to abnormal proportions, aiming for highly unlikely results: "But.. But, Peter Jackson's got these really nice composites in the Lord of the Rings films! Why can't I have that too??" It's been a good learning curve, though. Here are some stills from some finished scenes: