hey! so this was requested by @weirdlyfitting and before i say anything, i'd just like to disclaim that i'm definitely not an expert at editing, everything i've learned was by trial-and-error or youtube tutorials. (also i have no idea what your level of experience is, so i'm just gonna assume you're an after effects beginner like me lol). i'm also basing this off of @feranelia's extremely helpful post, which i'm adapting for after effects and adding in my own tips and tricks!!
i've found that easier-to-mask shots usually have a pretty plain background--merida's explorations of mor'du's cave are so much easier to mask than, say, inside her room. also, dark-to-medium backgrounds tend to blend in better with merida's hair anyway (really light colors, like merida in the fog, tend to still leave an outline on the hair and don't look great anywhere else). take a look at how color keying affects the room vs. the cave:
(and that's with the room's background mostly masked out! it's tough to get everything around her, especially if it's stubborn and keeps connecting to her hair).
hurray, i've chosen the shot i want! but in order to use color key, i want to really make merida's hair pop to avoid being keyed out. i usually use exposure + its gamma correction option, hue/saturation, and sometimes color balance (i usually just up the red midtones, sometimes lower the blue midtones if i feel it's not orangey enough) to make sure the hair is nice and bright, but not unnatural looking. plus, you can always go back and change it once you've imported the mask into your desired shot. here's the comparison of the original shot (left of the divider) vs. how i've colored it (right of the divider).
3. masking the main part of merida
first i set a green shape for the "green screen" so i can see merida more clearly lol. and then, basically as it says: i use masking (i set the masking to "none" while doing it, so i can see the whole layer) to capture merida's whole figure, with only the inner hair--no outer hair, and none of the background should show.
i like the mask around the hair to curve, so usually i use the convert vertex tool on those vertexes. i usually just name this layer "main" for organization and then set the mask back to "add" once i'm done with it. (masking the main part of merida, especially when trying to mask her out from a dark background, is also good because her dress and inner hair can get really dark, and if you key the dark background colors out they'd otherwise take the hair + dress with them).
a lot of times her arms/hands/bow/etc will stick out from her body, so i don't mask those (hence the right arm not being included in the mask) and will get to that after the hair.
(ignore the random green spots on merida in the GIF--they're not there in the after effects project so it's prob just a weird compression thing! we'll soldier on anyway.)
4. color keying out the background!
at this point i'll bring in another copy of the colored shot and put that above the main mask. then, i add the color key effect to it! (adobe says it's obsolete, but i still think it's useful, smh.) i'll also bring in another layer to serve as a "test background" to see how the hair looks on something that isn't bright green. usually i just use a screenshot of the inside of rapunzel's tower!
(sometimes i've also used "leave color" on the layer--just make sure to pick the color of the outer hair--to help with keying out the background color if there's a lot of different colors. this can be really hit or miss though and usually still requires quite a bit of masking, like merida in her room as shown before).
a lot of times, you have to divide up merida's hair into 2 or 3 parts--this time, it's two parts. i decided to do the left part first, and color keyed a random spot on the background, then upped the color tolerance until i felt it looked good (often you have to play around with the color tolerance a lot until you find a nice spot--i don't use the edge thinner since i'm not sure how useful it is, since whenever i use it, it turns out blocky). as for edge feathering, i put it at 2, but i don't go beyond 4.
after keying the left side of the hair, i then mask out whatever's left of the background (this can take a while, considering how close the little bits of the bg are to the hair). sometimes it can look bad against the green, but this is where i use the test background to see how it'll look in an edit. merida's hair blends in GREAT with earthy tones so if there's a huge problem with her hair i just use the background to cover it up lmao. here's how it looks so far:
(however, we can still see there's a bit of a gap in between the main mask and the left hair--that's where i go in and fix the main mask so i'll fill in the gaps!)
then, i bring in another copy of the colored shot and basically do the same thing with the right side of her hair. if it's a colorful background, sometimes i'll have to use several color key effects and just keep piling them on top of each other on the same layer.
so now we have a right hair, a left hair, and a main merida! oftentimes with my masking i find that there's definitely a "better half"--in this case, the right side came out nicer than the left side did--AKA, the right side had less black outlining on it (and if i tried to remove the remaining black on the left side, it would start cutting out too much of the hair. ah well!).
so i tried to expand the right side's mask as much as possible, and made sure that the left black outline didn't intrude too much into the right side--i had to play around with the masks for a while to make sure it looked smooth, and of course made sure that the main mask filled all the gaps. (keying out the right background also preserved some of merida's arm and hand). here's how it looks now!
(again, disregard the green spots on merida's hand--more compression issues, it looks fine in the project panel lol).
6. adding in her bow/arms/etc
the finishing touch! time to add in ANOTHER colored copy and either mask, or rotoscope, everything else. my personal preference is rotoscoping, so i'll go for that! if rotoscoping doesn't do the exact perfect job i want it to, sometimes i'll also use the eraser tool to clean it up. here's merida after adding in her bow and arm!
(aaand third time's the charm, keep on ignoring those green spots on her. she's all done!)
here i make sure that the green background and test background (or really anything except merida herself) are turned off. to export her as a transparent gif, i export her in the render queue and click lossless to change the settings: making sure the format is quicktime, then changing the channel to RGB + alpha, and the color to straight (unmatted). then i title it properly and export!
8. adjusting the thumbnail (optional)
i work on a mac, so this may be different for PC users, but whenever i export a transparent .mov, it doesn't generate a thumbnail, and instead uses the default thumbnail. to change that, i take a screenshot of merida's mask, open the screenshot in preview/image viewer, and then go to edit -> copy.
then, i open the "get info" tab of the .mov, click the tiny thumbnail at the top, and command-v/paste the screenshot there. (i found a couple of ways to do it on windows here!) here's the .mov before and after adjusting the thumbnail:
(totally optional, but i like to use it for organizational purposes. plus, it's a lot better than just guessing how the .mov looks when i want to use it in a later project).
and there you have it!! hope this helps :) have fun!!
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