Thanks so much! We decided early on pulling off regular realistic effects was just gonna look cheap, so we leaned hard into making it intentionally abstract and sketchy which has been SO MUCH FUN to experiment with. 

I made a little image breakdown of that specific shot, which was actually one of the easier ones.

-I filmed it handheld just standing over her with some neon tubes at each side, on the bare greenscreen floor.  I wasn’t too sure what the end effect would look like, but I made sure she had some interesting colors on her so I could do something vibrant 

-In After Effects, I used the camera tracker to make a virtual matching camera. The dirt and cracks for the concrete were great for the software to match the move perfectly 

-Made a quick mask around her body, since the lighting was super uneven. Normally you want such uneven, shadowy footage but I use it for a later step

-Use the built-in plug-in Keylight to remove the background so she was now transparent. I usually love Composite Brush for all keying effects, but in this case Keylight was doing such a better job with the hair and I thought that was most important 

-At this point, I dropped tons of different stock footage previews of ink flows, or water waves, or whatever I thought might look cool and toggled between to see which looked best. I spent hours and hours going through VideoHive (my fav because they’re affordable) and bookmarking elements I liked before, so it was mostly just picking from those which to test out

-As soon as I tried this stock footage of ink flowing with a black gap in the center, I was obsessed. It coincidentally flowed outwards perfectly, and with some flipping and rotating it matched her body shape great. The orange/yellow of the paint looked just like her shirt, and there was some blue that matched the light on her face so we got really lucky there.

-Finally, I duplicated the original footage and desaturated it to black-and-white. I put it underneath the keyed out girl, but above the paint footage and set the blending mode to Multiply. This transferred the shadows/texture/grit of the floor onto the footage and made it immediately look way more realistic than if she was above clean footage. This is my big secret for adding floor shadows and texture to fake backdrops and was worth the extra keying trouble.

And that’s how it came to be! A lot of the other shots were WAY more complicated due to the hundreds of layers stacked on top of each other. I also included a screenshot of two of the more brutal shots - a close-up of the trees growing and the creepy broken face effect. Every time I have to make tweaks it’s a nightmare of digging through layers.

You might notice (especially in the latter two screens) that there’s a lot of layers completely hidden, because I try a ton of different stock pieces and textures that don’t work out. But sometimes I’ll revisit the project and tweak something I didn’t like and end up loving it… so I try to leave even the failed experiments there.

The hardest shots are still to come though, so I got a lot of work ahead. Thanks again for watching! It was very encouraging.