Herringbone - Henri's Hands
Our job in short was to reduce the size of the hero’s hands in each and every shot they are seen. We knew that green screen would only be useful for a couple of shots. Technically, the rest would be shot as single plates, which we would extract elements from and then repair. Our bag of comping tricks would include rotoscoping, repositioning, scale reduction and matte painting.
This incredible tale had to be believable and a lot of that rested on Fin’s work being spot on. The fact that we were relying on rotoscoping to create elements was in fact a big help to this end. We had little in the way of integration issues, as we were comping elements back into their native scenes. Really our biggest challenge was making these elements fit once the hand was repositioned and reduced.
In the piano sequence, for example, the new hands were rotoscoped, reduced and repositioned, then re-timed and re-tracked to match the playing action of the selected take.
Once that was done the fingers of the new smaller hands no longer reached the piano. So the piano was separated from the background and moved closer to the boy. Reducing the hands meant that more of the insides of the shirtsleeves were needed where wrists had once been. Matte painted sleeve extensions were tailored and tracked to the existing sleeves. The piano keys were individually animated up and down to match the boy’s finger action. New reflections were created and added to complete the illusion.
By Garth Davis at Exit Films for M&C Saatchi Sydney
