The scenes with Darth chasing down Luke are very fast, (quick cuts to keep the tension up) This doesn’t give me a whole lot to work with but does keep the number of frames, that I need to manipulate down.
Step one of the process was to re cut the sequence to give the impression of Luke being shot.
The sequence if pretty quick so any dialog will need to be kept to a minimum.
Once the script was worked out I filmed it against a blue wall and made sure the take would fit the sequence.
Darth is predominately lit from one side so my lighting was set up similarly.
The blue screen wasn’t entirely required as most of the image would be masked, but as I had the wall it seemed like I may as well use it.
Cutting out the head.
Once I had extracted the head from the blue screen I set about masking my chin. (as I am talking throughout all the shots my jaw line moves up and down, Darth wears a hig collar so it was important to remove my neck from the shot, I set up a mask with two anchor points at the bottom of my chin and simply worked through the footage inserting key frames on that mask where necessary. – I now had a disembodied talking head.
Matching Heads
The scene is very dark so it was unlikely that I would find any good points for motion tracking and as there weren’t too many frames to deal with so I set about key framing my head into the new positions (temporarily lowering the opacity on the head to allow seeing through it made this fairly simple)
Once the head was in I started correcting the colour so it better matched the footage. After lots of trial and error I went with a bluish tint (Night for day style thing) I tried to colour it to similar skin colouring as like but th1s turned out to look completely wrong (not sure Darth likes the light). – multiple tweekings of this setting as each monitor I view it on seems to give different results.
More shadows
Darth’s helmet required more shadows to be cast on my face to I used a burn brush to darken down the areas that needed it.
More light
In the original footage light reflects of Darth’s mask, To achieve this type of effect I duplicated the footage extracted the Highlights and converted this into an alpha mask. This mask was the used to mask on a duplicate of the head footage that had the colour adjusted to a show the highlights.
My Face isn’t made of metal
As Darth has a metal head and I don’t, I needed to soften the highlights So A blur was applied the the highlights mask it looked more like light on skin. Finally I changed the highlights from white to red, there are lots of red light sources inside the ship, and no white ones so the red light seemed a better fit.
A final edit of the sequence, (left it at Luke exploding rather that a shot away to rebel base and everyone looking sad, then back to me with final comment), tightened it up significantly.