In one of our shots, the team wanted a reflection of the corpse in the camera lens. Upon initial plans, it was supposed to be achieved in pre-production, but thanks to our 'test shoot', we realised that this would be difficult to achieve, and much more feasible in the edit. So, after we got back from our test shoot, I was able to try to imitate this effect in a way that still makes it 'real'.
TEST SHOT:
OFFICIAL SHOT:
I achieved this by doing the following (in After Effects)
SHOT ORIGINAL:
I first sized down a snapshot of the original to around the size of the lens and added a slight inflate/warp effect to make the image rounder, imitating the shape of the camera lens.
After pre-composing this, I added a circular mask onto it to match the size of the camera lens.
I then slightly feathered the mask to ensure it blended into the background nicely and changed the blending mode to overlay.
But, it didn't look quite right. The overlay effect blended nicely into the lens, but it looked too transparent. So I added a cyan solid layer with the same circular mask underneath it, to make it more opaque.
Which resulted in the final result (as depicted in the second image). In regards to tracking, I tracked the motion of the camera lens using the after effects tracker tool, attached that to a null layer, which was then attached to the photo of the body, and also the cyan layer - to create this:
That's all for this one folks.
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