The Situation
There was one sequence where a young boy is trying to wake up Hancock, played by Will Smith, who happens to be sleeping in a bench in front of an electronics storefront. The electronics storefront has numerous LCD televisions playing some breaking news of a high speed pusuit on the freeway.The challenge was to composite the breaking news footage into at least 10 screens, while preserving the reflections on the storefront glass and motion of the screens.
How we thought about it
The insert footage was treated with a television look and news crawl graphics added for realism of the newscast. Tracking the numerous screens posed a challenge, but through automated and manual iterative refinements, the tracks for the screens were solidified. In addition,we preserved the reflections through the layering of chroma key passes, and in some cases generated and matchmoved reflections when they where lost in the chroma green television signal.
Results
Accurate 3D tracking information and numerous chroma key passes delivered a visually appealing sequence in the film.