Pasithea

Okay,

I admit, I'm pleased with myself. Last night I fiddled with the commercial a bunch more. I took the washed out copy I had and made another copy without the washout. After fiddling with the channels, I discovered that he was mostly reds and the background was mostly blues, so by playing with the channel values, I was able to get a version that was dark blue and bright red. Then I dropped the colour out of that, making a black and white image. Then I adjusted the brigthness and contrast to get pure fields of black and white. I exported that to an animation program and cleaned up the bits of white in the black and bits of black in the white to get solid fields. Then I brought that back into Premiere and applied a gaussian blur to it. (Whew. That was a lot of stuff!)
So? Why did I do all this? It was like the masks I used in my previous movie. What I had at this point was a mask I could use to put the normally-lit character into the washed out background. This kind of mask isn't perfect, of course, or I'd have just matted him onto a white field, but what I was able to do was dim the mask down to a transparency mask so that I was overlaying his colours onto the washed out colours of the background. The washed out version of him under the rich colour version of him filled any of the holes I missed in my mask.
I'm fairly pleased with the result. The finished video is now where the washed out one was. I moved the washed out one to chmarr_old.mov and I put up a chmarr_bad.mov, which is the original video with no filters applied, just for comparison if anyone is interested.
Anyhow, all in all, a good evening worth of work. :) I think maybe I should consider changing my name from DV_girl to DV_QUEEN :)

-Sammi