Cartoon Lagoon Compositing
Summary
I was lucky enough to contribute to the pilot of the show Cartoon Lagoon. The show is a Mystery Science Theater 3000-like production in which puppet characters go on adventures and riff on awful cartoons from the early days of animation.
Process
I composited forty-eight shots for Cartoon Lagoon. Most of the shots involved planar tracking in Mocha, followed by compositing and shading passes in After Effects to attach the faces to the practical puppets. Many shots were then finished off with some keying/despill work.
I was tasked with compositing a number of difficult shots for the project. Chief among them was the shot in which the character Axel was blindfolded. The blindfold covered all of his tracking markers and his fast motion left me with an almost-unmanageable amount of motion blur.
The solution to the problem ended up being to get a 2D track of Axel's white hat in After Effects and then use an expression to invert the motion of the track and apply it back to the footage. This resulted in Axel's head floating and twisting perfectly still in the center of the screen. I could then track his practical nose for the location of his face and rotoscope the blindfolded area without worrying about him bouncing all over the shot.
Another fun challenge was creating the look of glass on the front of Willy's helmet. This was accomplished by tracking the front of the helmet in Mocha, inverting the motion of the track, and applying it to an image of the room. This resulted in a image that moved in the opposite direction as his helmet, giving the illusion of a glass reflection.
