Post-Production Project

This is the breakdown for my post production project, using Nuke. I managed to get a decent result, after a bit of trial and error. I spent a fair amount of time trying to get my HDR image to work properly in Maya for environment lighting, to no avail. The problem was the photograph I took of my HDRI reflective ball wasn't ideal; I think I placed it too close to the floor. Anyway I couldn't get it to produce the long shadow, so I used it anyway, but added in a directional light to mimic the low sun in the sky. 

The reason the rotoscope looks crappy is because I used it as a  garbage matte for a key of the ocean and sand. It did save me time meticulously rotoscoping frame by frame every detail, however I did have to use several travelling mattes to put back in highlights that were still being pulled by the key node. The tails of the dogs were a bit of a bitch to do actually, especially the first dog. Because of the excessive motion blur when it wagged, I found the only way to rotoscope this was to put in a simple brown ramp when it was at it's most transparent, to stop the background coming through. I found a fancy lens flare package in after effects which I used to bring it all together, I did try not to use a too 'in your face' one. I am very pleased with the overall result, but there are a few revisions I could make: I think the shadows are too feathered at their ends compared with the dog and people, and despite the sand beach being quite flat, I could have created an uneven sand-like floor in Maya so the text looks like it is slightly embedded in the sand, not perfectly placed on top (though as it stands I don't think it's that noticeable). 

The node graph from Nuke. I had a stab at using coloured Backdrop nodes to keep things organised.