Planning a shot for special effect.

dlevanchuk

dlevanchuk

Need your guys' and girls' ideas on how to shoot the following scene:

A girl is reading a book on the sofa. A sock (don't ask.. its a comedy/suspence short), that earlier came to life, holds a knife, and slits her throat.

I want to shoot acress and a sock in one frame, where sock is fully visible.
My idea was to have a "sock puppitier" to wear a white sock on his hand, and "move it". Then shoot exactly the same frame, without "sock puppitier" in the frame, and in after effects mask the actors arm out. Then i can overlay two footages..

OR would it be easier to shoot with a green screen, and remove the green in after effects?
 
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I think I'd probably rotoscope this - the green spill could be difficult to get rid of, and you'd probably end up rotoscoping bits of it anyway. As long as the blank plate matches up perfectly and the puppeteer's sleeve is a different colour to the sock, it should be a fairly simple shot to pull off.
 
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Maybe somebody here can offer better advice, because I’m no expert. But, from what I’ve learnt, in both cases you’ll need the plate (the shot without actors in it).

If you want to just mask out the actors arm, you’ll need to animate the mask to follow the sock and ensure it is always covering the actor (and not covering the sock). Doing this can be tedious as you need to rotoscope the whole thing frame by frame, unless you use keyframes (animation starting and ending points), which does some of the work for you, but won’t be perfect. Even if you mask it perfectly, the shot may still look a little fake…

In my opinion, your best bet would be to have the puppeteer wear a green/blue (whichever is best for the shot) sleeve over any visible parts of his arm. You can then key this out and you should get decent results (I think?). You may still need to do some masking though.

In any case, I’d advise you to make sure there is no movement in the camera during the shoot, cause this can lead to the need for tracking, which can be done, but if it’s not perfect, it’ll stand out like a sore thumb!
 
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Well if you just do a garbage mask around the whole area the sleeve is gonna be during the scene, you might not need to roto unless the sock at some point enters that mask. Even if you do have to roto though, it won't take that long at all.
But yeah you'll need a plate
 
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