The brief
The character is paraplegic; the actor is not. Production shot the performance practically with a green sock as a matte aid, and VFX finished it: the leg is removed, the trouser is extended with folded ends, and the background behind the limb is rebuilt frame by frame. The trailer also needed a believable social-media livestream interface with comments, likes and icons laid over the footage.
What made it hard
A limb removal fails the moment an edge chatters or the rebuilt background drifts against the camera move. Every paint patch had to stay locked to the plate through the move, and the folded trouser had to carry the same motion blur and grain as the real cloth next to it.
How we did it
Each plate was tracked in SynthEyes so the clean background could be projected through the camera move. The green sock gave a starting matte, refined by hand in Silhouette. The replacement leg, background and trouser extension were painted in Nuke frame by frame, then grain-matched and delivered to the editor's spec. The livestream UI was built as tracked, screen-space layers so it holds position through the move.
Behind the scenes
- SynthEyes camera solve per shot so paint patches stay locked through the camera move
- Green-sock key as a first matte, cleaned by hand in Silhouette on every frame
- Trouser extension with folded ends painted to match the motion blur and grain of the real cloth
- Livestream overlay built as tracked UI layers: comments, likes and icons in the style of TikTok, Instagram and Facebook
- Delivered in a high-quality format to the editor's spec
