Quick Airport Security breakdown

I posted an image a couple of days ago, some with a keen eye might have noticed the TV reflection in one of the Airport Soldiers gas masks.

Worth pointing out they’re actually both the same person.

The jagged edges and generally rushed work isn’t something I’m too bothered about here since I was making this photo for a prop newspaper that’s going to appear in this currently untitled Zombie film I’m filming in February.

Anyhoo, for anyone that’s interested in how I created this photo. Here’s a VERY short breakdown.

I actually did this inside After Effects, not photoshop. Just because I use AE constantly it comes much easier for me.

This is the finished photo. I really darkened the soldiers face with colour grading so we can’t see they’re both the same person.

The photo’s really broken down in to 3 parts, foreground, midground and background. Background image is an airport photo I pulled from google images.

A fundamental part of VFX is to sell the illusion, to do that properly you need to make sure all your images / footage merge together nicely.

For example, here I use a strong light to bring all the photos together. There’s a very strong light source that’s casting lights and creating shadows. Which creates the illusion they’re all in the same place.

The more real life elements you have mixing with your artificial effects the better it will look. (light, wind, water, smoke, etc)

You can also see this image’s slightly rotated. Rotation your images so they match it also a really important of selling the effect

 You can see how the light’s positioned differently in each photo.

The brightness as well, changes for the character that’s further away / the character who’s right beside the cameras flash.

As for the grain, my powerful light broke so I just stepped up the gain settings on my camera, but the grain actually does also work as an element to bring the photos together.

I also used a lens flare on the actual light just to ground the image that bit more.

Colour correction and colour grading is fundamental, if you don’t do that right your image just wont work, but I’ll probably go over that later since that’s an entirely different subject