WIP "Holland" scene V1

(Sorry for the awful quality. Blogger's video upload was being temperamental and I had to resort to Photobucket!)

Got the second cow in there now and even managed to get the windmill going! The picture I took was of relatively high resolution and the contrast between the sky and the body of the mill itself was great enough to make the selection process really easy. To get the sails to rotate I simply cut them out of the original image and pasted them onto a new layer. 

This obviously left a huge gap in the body of the windmill which I did a quick (and pretty shoddy) repair job on — but again, much like the cows, it's far off into the distance so I don't think it's too noticeable…!

To fill the gaps I simply made a feathered selection of the rough shape of the top of the windmill. I moved this selection and copied a large chunk of the body, which has a very similar texture/pattern.

It's far from an exact match and there's part of a window floating in the top left corner, but fortunately the position of the sails will mostly cover up the inconsistencies.

To repair the rest of the body I used a small clone stamp to brush in the missing sections.

It looks terrible, but once you put the sails on...

... It doesn't look too bad. Certainly adequate for my needs!

I think things are looking okay so far in terms of composition. I still need to find an office chair that matches the angle of the desk and my shoddy rotoscoping job on the cows is still really bothering me (especially on the tail), but aside from that I think that this will certainly be useable in my final film.

Lawrence gave me some great advice on using additional cameras and After Effects' 3D layer controls to create a false depth of field which massively improved the look of the scene. Already I'm seeing potential for this idea in the final film — I could blur the scene behind the window frame very slightly before shifting the focus to the field outside, just before everything pops on-screen.