Mascarpone
A car crash thrusts Francis, the dreamy film projectionist, into the world of the ruthless gangster Mascarpone
My Role: Compositing
Year: 2017, Director: Jonas Riemer, Produced at: Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf
Mascarpone is a project from students at Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf. It is an hommage to classic ganster movies and was realized by mixing a number of traditional effects, stop motion animation with modern Visual Effects and Compositing.
I supported the Visual Effects team by doing the compositing on a few of the many VFX shots in the film. The main tasks on each of the shots were keying, rotoscoping, 3D camera tracking and creating the cardboard city backdrop by projecting a number of photos of a prebuilt cardboard set onto rough geometry.
Here you can see some stills:
This was the most challenging and also most fun shot I worked on. There is quite a lot of camera movement so the 3D track had to be solid and the background projection geometry needed to be as accurate as possible to create a believable parallax in the background.
To give the backdrop more live, I added a number of cardboard cars with headlights driving by and inserted a few passersby. Besides that I worked quite a while on the key to get the edges on the fur coat as clean as possible and in the end we even added quite a bit of warp on Mascarpone's face to make the character appear even more intimidating and grotesque.