Masking

Of all the shots that had to be masked, I found 39 one the hardest because Nikita had to snatch a rose from herself which was tricky as contact was involved between the two masked characters. When filming this shot, I came into the scene and Nikita snatched the rose from my hand. This made it look realistic as she was actually snatching it from someone, instead of pretending to. When it came to editing this shot, I had to mask myself out and mask the slut character in.

This shows the masking around the slut character as I begun to work on the snatching of the rose. At first it was difficult because when the nerd character reached out to steal the rose, it was still visible in the second characters hand.

This shot shows the mask that was made around the nerd character to guide her  movement in the actual snatching of the rose. What kept going wrong was the fact that it looked like the nerd character was going through the character of the slut when her hand went in for the rose, so in effect it distorted the footage altogether. What's more, a shadow was cast around the nerd character when she was in motion which emphasised the mask. As a result, two more masks had to be added to the layer.

In order to resolve the issue of the transitory hand and the fact that the rose was still there when the nerd had already snatched it, I had to import that section into Photoshop. Here, I used the Clone Stamp to take a sample of Nikita's skin colour on her neck, and use this to remove the rose, so in effect, it made it look like it had been snatched.

Scenes 59-61 consisted of the characters swapping the instruments. Firstly, the nerd had the tambourine and then in the next shot, the characters on either side of her had it. The next shot then showed the nerd back with the tambourine and the last shot, the other two characters had it again. Also, it proved challenging to get the characters to sing the line in time with each other and, once I had become familiar with the masking, it was this that became the most time consuming part of the editing.

This shot shows the nature character being masked into the shot, where in she and the slut would be playing the tambourine and the nerd would just be singing. 

Finally, this shot shows all three characters masked into the shot, with the tambourines in the right place and the singing matched up. I discovered that switching on the waveforms helped a great deal when trying to align the singing as I could visually see when it was out, and which characters needed to be put in time with the others.