What’s up Western!  I’m back, and bringing you another fun little video clip.

This eye replacement was actually moderately easy to accomplish.  There was only one step that was difficult, which was the motion tracking.  I took the raw footage into After Effects and motion tracked two points in his left eye, when the tracking points got out of place, I had to just manually adjust them.  Then I made a new null object which I attached all the tracking data to.  Then I had footage of my self spreading my eyes wide open,  looking to the left, then to the right, and took a freeze frame of each direction. After that, I masked out the white parts in my eyes, using two seperate masks and blended them together by feathering the masks together.

Once that step is done, I went back to the footage that I wanted to do the eye replacement on, create a new solid layer and masked out the eye.  I then took the parenting whip for the mask and the eyes from the other footage, and attach it to the null object. Then I made sure to put the main footage on the bottom of the time lime, followed by the null object, the eye, and finaly the mask of the original eye. Then I set the track matte of the eye to an alpha matte.

From here, I added a little bit of shadow to make the eye feel like it was actually in there.  I added a new object, the color of the shadows from the darker side of the face, and masked out a shadow-like shape and feathered it.  I then copied the eye mask and pasted it above the shadow on the timeline.  Then I set the track matte for the shadow to alpha matte, and also parented it to the null object.

Then I did the same thing for the right eye except I used different track points  and a different null object. I also wanted to make the eye look glossy so I added a little light flare on the left eye.

And there you have it!  Sounds complex, I know, but it’s nowhere near as difficult as it sounds.