Throwing Objects

At one point in iSundae II, a character tosses a small paper packet out her front door. It is extremely difficult to show the packet going anywhere if you just throw it on camera. To fix this, I fired up Final Cut Express and built a matte around a shot of the packet. This isolated the packet, which I could then animate to the exact spot that I wanted it to land.

Animating Mattes

We shot a scene on blue screen with a character pulling out a map. Unfortunately, the map had lots of blue on it, so when I went to key the scene, the map disappeared. No problem. I duplicated the video clip, moved it up a layer, and then proceeded to animate a matte around the map (try saying that ten times fast).

I have also discovered that swords and blue screen do not mix. Guess what I’m doing to get the swords back!

Screen Savers

One of our characters has a little screen that he projects his visual aids onto. In one shot, we didn’t have anything to put on the screen, so I created a little logo in Photoshop, brought that into Final Cut, and did a little animated screen saver.

As you can see, keyframe animation can produce some pretty neat effects. They can be your best friend in some difficult movie effects situations.