USTA Production

When it came time to shoot the promo for USTA, I felt relatively prepared. My concept was simple enough, the shots were clear, I had written a shot list, made note of the props and talent needed, and felt confident it would go off without a hitch once the cameras started rolling. For the most part, things went very smooth. I was able to light, shot and wrap everything within about a half hour or less, as most of the shots were just the tennis ball on the floor of the green screen room.

When I put it into editing though, thats where I began to run into some problems. Keying out the tennis ball was the biggest challenge. We had lit the scene with a orange gel to give the ball a bit more definition, and differentiate it from the floor, and on camera things seemed to look fine. But when I put it into After Effects to do my keying and compositing, trouble struck. There were only 1 or 2 angles where I could key everything I didn't need, and maintain everything I did need. For 90% of my shots, I either ended up with a scene where the green screen was still visible, or the ball had portions of it missing.

My teammate ran into the same issues, and suggested reshooting at an actual court over the weekend, rather than try to composite the ball into a video where the angles might not be right. I agreed that it would be the better way of doing things, but I didn't want to waste the class time that I had. So in case things didn't work out over the weekend, or if some unexpected rain cancelled the shoot, I played things on the safe side and created a 15 second After Effects animation using 2D graphic animation and photographic images of athletes playing tennis.

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UPDATE

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The project is now complete. I was able to turn in multiple short animations and a footage-based promo. The animations were surprisingly successful, and the client seemed to really like them. It was a little disappointing that my original idea couldn't come to fruition, but I was happy that I could at least deliver a quality project that the client enjoyed.

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