Brix & Mortar BFI

While working at Ratchet I was tasked with creating a series of shots for promotional material to help sell the long form documentary they were helping create. This included treatments for newspaper headlines and archive footage, which would be used in the promos as well as the final cuts of the documentary.

This then extended into creating further archive treatments at a later date for a trailer to be shared with the BFI as part of the film's general promotional material.

Motion Designer
3D Generalist
VFX Compositor

In collaboration with
Daniyal Harris-Vajda

Breakdown of the closeup shot from the first sequence

Development Breakdown

Breakdown of the archive footage treatment

To create the archive treatments I had to firstly make the stock footage feel more nostalgic, so I layered up a selection of footage textures I have in my bank of assets to help make it feel more like it was shot on a Super8 camera and projected onto the wall
behind the subject.

For the wide shots I then had to take the footage of the subject and rotoscope them out, as well as create a clean plate in Photoshop and a depth pass
to be used in Cinema4D.

In C4D I used the depth pass to create a rough displacement on a plane in order to help add realism to the shot. I then used the Super8-style footage and projected in onto the plane.

Once this was rendered out for the entirety of the footage I would then take this back into After Effects and composite the footage onto the back wall behind the subject and layer back in the rotoscoped subject and add any final glows to add realism.

Previously for the closeup shots the archive was restricted to only the eyes, for which I used the After Effects plugin Lockdown to track the eyes and mask them manually to get a refined outcome.

This was changed for the BFI trailer so that the archive would be on the side of the subject's face. This allowed it to be much larger in frame, and thus more visible to the audience.
To achieve this I had to rotoscope the person before creating a depth pass. Then I used the depth pass as a displacement map to warp the archive footage over the contours of the subject's face. Refinements were then manually masked in, as well as layers of glow added to make it look like the footage was being projected in-shot.

The final step was to add all 3 treatments together and transition between them with some film burn and light leak effects. The order of them would depend on whether the section is to transition into archive footage (wide shot > eyes closeup > full frame) or
out of it (full frame > eyes closeup > wide shot).

I also was tasked with creating a treatment for newspaper headlines to be used throughout
the documentary. For this I felt they had to be bold enough to stand out yet legible in a short duration. The impact is driven through extreme camera closeups on keywords, and flash inverting the colours during camera transitions.

Newspaper headline treatment

Breakdown of the wide shot from the second sequence