FOX45 Morning News Ticker Promo

Skills: Visual Effects, On-set Art Direction, Graphic Design

FOX45 decided to take a bombastic approach to promoting its refreshed Morning News Ticker in 2019. Together with the Art Director, I helped to brainstorm the technical methodology of bringing the Promotions Producer’s vision to life.

We used as a dummy object a white pipe with black tape that would serve as tracking points. While the round shape, width and weight of the pipe seemed comfortable for the anchors to toss around and catch compared to a floppy or hard-edged prop, it also brought about some technical challenges.

First, due to the roundness, it was going to spin, which could translate to spin in the virtual object—-not ideal when the ticker was supposed to stay facing the camera. The weight at least reduced the spin somewhat.

Second, the white color of the pipe necessitated rotoscoping the talents’ hands instead of a simple key. The initial thought was that the white color would provide the highest contrast against the tracking markers, and reduce spillage on the talents’ bodies. However, I believe using a green object still would’ve provided enough contrast against the tracking points, and correcting green color spillage would have been an easier feat than the tedious task of rotoscoping the talents’ hands.

I provided on-set oversight to make sure we got usable footage—mainly, asking to reduce motion blur and spin on the dummy object.

Pulling the greenscreen key was simple using Keylight in After Effects, but even with the consideration taken during the video shoot, it took a lot of trial and error to build a virtual object from the tracking points and rotoscope the talents’ hands using Mocha Pro.

But after compositing the ticker that I rebuilt in Photoshop and After Effects into the scene with the rotoscoped hands on top, it looked fairly seamless.