Wilfred Season 2 (2012) and Season 3 

I worked on Wilfred Season 2 and Season 3. In season 1, they shot interior scenes for Ryan’s house (Elijah Wood's character) at an actual house in a Venice Beach location, California. However, from season 2, they could no longer use the location because of the neighbors’ complaints. Therefore, they set up the house interior in the green screen set at Fox Studio Lot exactly like the actual house from season 1. I went to the Fox Studio Lot Green Screen set to put tracking markers and did lighting/tracking tests to see if Interior FG and Green Screen BG are lit well to key the green and do tracking for both day scenes and night scenes. The show was shot by DSLR cameras with shallow depth of field, which made it difficult to key edges and hair. Also, Wilfred’s entire body is covered by fur, so it required complicated keying. Therefore, I developed methods to denoise the footage for keying and clean the edges for alpha. For some shots, I specifically separate the grainy channel and blurred it so that keying will be more smooth. I also set up a template pipeline to bring back the real reflection on the window to composite the background naturally and share the template with other artists. In addition, I added light wrap around the edges so that the background would realistically bleed into the foreground a little bit. Most audiences didn’t even realize that they were all green screen shots. The show won an ASC award in Cinematography, and Producers told us that we made the Visual Effects so realistically seamless and pleasing to the eyes, so the show was able to win the award. In season 3, there were many night scenes especially because of the Christmas episode. The DSLR camera is not good at shooting dark shots, so keying the night scenes was more difficult than the day scenes. The reflection on the windows is stronger at night scenes which can cause more trouble for keying and tracking. However, I developed the technique and template to solve the problems and make the process go smoothly. Also, almost all the shots in this show were shot by handheld cameras, so the footage was shaky and required good tracking. I used Mocha to accomplish difficult tracking shots. For all these shots, I tracked, keyed, and composited entirely. We also shot the outside views from every window angle as Background Plate footage for day and night. I composited them together with the Green Screen FG accordingly depending on the camera angles. I was the lead compositor, so I did the most difficult shots in the project. I tracked, keyed, and did all the compositing tasks in the entire shots that I worked on. Also, I was the VFX Supervisor. I managed VFX by supervising VFX on set, analyzing the VFX tasks, bidding the VFX budgets, communicating with producers by emails and phone calls, assigning VFX tasks to appropriate artists efficiently and effectively, assessing the revision notes from the director, helping other artists by giving advice and solutions to revisions and problems, etc. Other than mainly working on the green screen shots for Ryan’s house interior scenes, we also did all the VFX scenes for the show such as a driving scene in a lightning storm, car crash shot, squirrels shots, arrow hit shots, split screens, morphing shots from one take to another, and so on. In season 2, I used After Effects, and in season 3, I used Nuke as well.