Repairing The Sky
November 9, 2009

Locations can present some interesting problems for the motion artist.  I was asked by the good folks over at Perpombellar Productions to help clean up the opening shot for their recent entry in the Doritos Crash The Super Bowl contest.

As you can see in the original footage, a lot of utility lines against the sky detract from the intended mood of the scene.  Fixing such a problem in a single photograph is a relatively easy task, but with moving HD video footage, the temporal quality of the shot must also be preserved.  Complicating things, the shot consists of a pretty big jib move with all sorts of objects in the foreground crossing over the axis of utility lines at various moments in the scene.  I had just a day to figure out how I was going to remove the unwanted elements and somehow manage to "keep it real."

With just a couple of days to turn the shot around, I employed Adobe After Effects and a third-party plugin from Boris FX, and set about the task of removing each line.  Unfortunately, there was no magic "utility line removal tool" to be found.  So, about 12 hours and over 16,000 keyframes later, the shot was done.

The finished spot is now online at both Perpombellar's and the Doritios sites above.  The top three vote winners in the contest air during the big game.