Rotoscoping and the Attack Dog VFX

Because I want to create a clear connection in Novikof's mind between his trauma's trigger (the happy regular dog) to his trauma (the vicious attack dog), I have come up with a special effect using rotoscoping. 

Rotoscoping is used to cut out pieces in a video from a background that is not one color (so you can't use chroma keying). 

I practiced this technique with my Evolution of Christmas music video.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02PAqissN3c

I downloaded the claymation video that Michael Buble was in, (White Christmas) and trimmed the video to the part where the claymation figure looked straight at the camera. I imported this 6 second clip to Adobe After Effects and clicked the "roto brush tool." 

On the first frame, I dragged the tool over Michael, selecting him. The program used tracking to try to select him the following frames, but often a bit of the multicolored and differently-focused background would be selected or some of him wouldn't be, so I went frame-by-frame (but could skip every two because the video was animated on 3's) clicking and dragging the roto brush tool over the parts of Michael the program didn't get and then holding the option bottom, clicking, and dragging the parts of the background that the program did select and shouldn't have. 

When I was finished with all of the frames, I clicked on the composition and then hit transparency. This made Michael on a transparent background. I exported this video making sure the in and out bars were at the beginning and ending of the clip. 

I then imported this short clip to Adobe Premiere Pro and played with the timing and reverse motion versions of this video, cutting, copying and pasting to create a string of footage that matched what Michael was saying in my audio. 

Application to Novikof:

I will rotoscope both of the elements in Novikof's traumatic flashbacks (the attack dog and the swinging investigation lamp) from footage I will take using Adobe After Effects, then I will import them to Adobe Premiere and further edit them. 

Attack Dog:

My other police officer neighbor has a large german shepherd dog that is kept in their backyard and will bark and become very easily vicious whenever I walk my small dog by his house. The dog has a history of extreme aggression and broke my dog's tail once and bit his head, drawing blood. I plan to walk by the house with my dog and camera and record the dog through my neighbor's gate and then apply to footage to the opening scene. My dog will not be harmed by this in any way, as the german shepherd will be within his protective gate. 

The minute I filmed this, another neighborhood dog walked past the house and the german shepherd. This got a very good reaction from her. Here are some of the raw frames from the footage:

I imported that raw footage into Adobe After Effects, creating a new composition with the proper settings. I used the roto brush to rotoscope the dog out of the shot, carefully looking through each frame to be sure the right parts were selected. I hit freeze frame, telling After Effects that I was finished with the rotoscoping. Then I went back to the main composition and exported the video on a black background so I could "color key" on Premiere Pro the background and get a nice thinned edge and feather. Then I added this over the original, nice dog footage and color corrected the attack dog roto. I added the same amount of gaussian blur that I did for the nice dog. 

Deciding I wanted to remove the nice dog from its background so flash shots of the attack dog, I right clicked on the nice dog footage, and replaced the video with an After Effect composition. I used the new content-aware video tool and masked out the dog and the owner, keying the mask path to surround them both. I then chose the content-aware settings: 

Alpha Expansion: 10

Fill Method: Object

Range: Work Area

Then I took this background footage and went back to Premiere to further edit the timing and movement and any overlays to connect the nice dog and attack dog footage with smoother transitions that make the audience see the traumatic connection in Novikof's mind.

I overlaid shots of my dad's Jeep to add a creepy car and lights feeling to the shots and further cover the imperfect content aware fill created because of how big the part I was covering was.  

After Effects Tutorial: Content-Aware Fill for Videos!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NSVDbuwpyQ&t=311s

This is how I made the attack dog effect.