For upcoming animation No Dogs or Italians Allowed, one of the major challenges for the whole production was that of compositing the shots together. The film is made up of stop-motion, photography and live-action material, and bringing all of these elements together into a single, harmonious sequence required plenty of forward planning and careful thought throughout the process.
We carried out a number of compositing tests ahead of time to ensure, as much as possible, that we got the right shots the first time. In general, you’ll have foreground and background elements, and some of these will have transparency or need keying out. For transition or camera moves, we make different kinds of pre-comp inOnce you know what shots you need, it’s time to work out how you’re going to capture them.
It probably goes without saying, but all of these individual shots must be captured from roughly the same sort of angle. The closer they are to each other, the easier they will be to merge together into a single, coherent shot.For the shot of our three characters walking up the side of a mountain, we had the foreground shot, the characters, the mountain, and the sky all as separate layers that needed compositing together.