We can transform objects into characters by adding a face to them, making them interact with other characters or using them as narrators. Let’s try to give a tree a face using Kdenlive.
If cartoon fairy tales, such as those produced by Disney, have left a mark on the common mentality, it is the idea of personifying animals or inanimate objects. It is an idea that can be applied to different cases: to tell a story involving objects, one can think of transforming them into narrators. It’s worth in a fantasy or an action movie, and maybe even a documentary. In addition to a classic comic sketch, where in the end everything is allowed. And the best way to personify an object is to give it a human face. For example, you can equip a tree with a face, and have it tell the story. Obviously, the ideal solution would be to create a three-dimensional model of an actor’s face and animate it with Blender, superimposing it on the original image of the tree. The problem with this method is that it is very demanding, above all because reproducing the features of an actor can be difficult if he is not already very experienced with 3D modeling. And all these efforts would be a waste if you want to do just a few seconds scene in a low budget video. Alternatively, you can resort to Kdenlive and some small tricks with the composition of the images. It all starts with a good image, a photograph or a video, of a tree. For convenience, the video clip should be shot with the camera fixed, so you don’t have to track the movement. Then you need a shot of the actor’s face, possibly in the foreground and well lit. The actor must be filmed against a monochromatic background, usually green, so that he can easily remove it later with Kdenlive using the chroma key technique. First of all, it will be necessary to cut the actor’s face, even manually, to get only his face. This can then be superimposed on the clip, but using the mode Overlay . This mode, by adequately adjusting the transparency of the image, allows to maintain the texture of the bark of the tree on the actor’s face. This way you can pretend that the actor’s face is really part of the tree. To improve the yield, it is important to change the color tone of the actor’s face in order to make it look as similar as possible to that of the bark of the tree, and also in this the effects of Kdenlive come in handy. The image obviously also needs high contrast, to make sure it is more like a sculpture or a protuberance of the tree’s wood, and not simply a photo pasted on the bark. To obtain a better fusion, the shaded margins are set at the contour that it was decided to cut out from the actor’s face, so as to obtain a slight fade on the edges and make it more difficult to understand where the real tree ends and where the actor’s face begins. As always, you can see the example video at the following address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlW4njdEt_0
Which light for the actor
To illuminate the actor it is important to think about the type of lighting that the bark of the tree on which we want to make his face appear should receive. In any case, an almost grazing light from above allows you to have very clear shadows, similar to what a raised bark would get from the Sun. Even the green background must be well lit, in order not to risk having too many shades of color. Ideally, it would be good to cover the sides of the actor, such as the neck, hair, and possibly even the ears, with clothes of the same color as the background cloth, to make them disappear automatically with the chroma key. If it is not possible, it is important that the actor remains as still as possible, so it will not be necessary to follow his movement to manually cut the face.
The two video clips: the tree and the actor
We prepare the tracks for the tree and for the face of the actor that will be superimposed
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Cut out only the face
We begin to cut only his face from the actor’s clip
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Adjust the light
We make the face black and white, increasing the contrast
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We choose the right color
Let’s give the face a color similar to that of the tree
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