Camera Tracking and Smooth Motion

So now the basic edit is done I will be focusing much more on the one shot I have assigned to me. To start off I needed to know how I was going to have the text and the 'lightening' animations to match the camera move on set. After visiting some tutorial websites and having several basic inductions I came to the conclusion that I needed to start to learn Adobe After Effects, whose many tools include a camera tracker and also the ability to provide smooth motion to key framed objects which is virtually impossible to do in Adobe Premiere. This is the camera tracker tool:

By pressing 'Track Camera' it tracks various random points in your video and essentially creates a 3D space for you to add objects or text that will stay in a fixed position within the motion of your video, giving the impression that they are at one with the raw footage. So I added text to one of the track points:

The 'Bullseye' tool, which you can alter depending on
how grounded you want your text to be within the video

A hell of a lot of rotating and altering on the x, y and z axis
eventually gave the impression that the text was standing
upright on the ground as the camera tracked out

So after a lot of experimenting and rewinding tutorial videos I eventually got the desired effect. Next on the agenda was the 'sofa' shot integrated into the same shot as the text. The way I wanted to do this was by photographing a still image of the actors on the sofa, with their heads facing the other way, cutting out the background in photoshop and then key framing the still image so it appeared that the camera tracked back beyond the sofa. I replaced the background with green so it could be easily keyed out.

After cutting out the background and trying to key frame the image in after effects I ran into a problem; key framing requires manually animating the image and the result was that as the sofa shot moved forwards it was in no way smooth. As the video played, the shot slowed down jarringly instead of smoothly slowing down and coming to a standstill. To combat this I realised that After Effects had to have some kind of graph based key framing which, thankfully, they did. Much like applying a curve tool effect in Photoshop, the way the key frames were positioned had to curve smoothly:

After applying this particular effect, the sofa shot was smooth and it finally began to slightly resemble the finished shot in Scott Pilgrim. Much more to do, such as applying the camera track to the sofa shot (which proved insanely difficult) but thats another blog post for another time. See y'all soon.