Sunset Drive

This key was particularly difficult to pull because of the nature and color of the actress' hair. Blonde hair is notoriously much harder to pull a clean key from and on top of that there was a wind machine making things much more difficult.

The final result:

The key (pun intended) to pulling this off was to create a lot of intricate edge mattes that would account for differences in the surface, level of focus, hair contrast, motion blur, and the slight value differences in the screen itself.

In total, I had 15 different edge mattes all working together to create 1 clean key.

I used Keylight because it's what I'm most familiar with and it seemed to perform better than Keyer, Primatte, and IBK with the fragile strands of hair. I run a test with each keyer whenever I start a new key to see which one works better where and here Keylight won throughout.

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To retain even more of the hair I used a hair detailing technique that I believe I learned from Steve Wright's Linda.com course (highly recommend).

I took the alpha from the keys I made which protected all of the fine details and created an edge matte from them using a color lookup node.

I created two sections for the hair to be controlled independently for greater flexibility. These then get used as masks for a grade on the BG which emphasizes all the delicate strands of hair that may be lost or too faint to see. Here's the result:

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The next steps were despilling and color correcting the plate to fit in better with the selected BG.

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I added some trees to fly by in the FG to help settle the BG because they felt like they were flying. I grabbed a .png of a tree, silhouetted it, gave it some directional blur with a gizmo I found on Nukepedia, and keyframed them to go by at random intervals.

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Lastly, I added some light wrap, some subtle camera shake, and a finishing grade to polish the shot off.