Hey all,

I'm doing post work on a low/no-budget music video which features the artist singing as he drives down the motorway. Some of the close-ups were filmed against green screen in a studio. It's set at night, so I've colour-matched the foreground to the background, to make it look like he's being lit by passing headlights and streetlamps and it all ties together quite well. The only problem is that there are no shadows being cast on the driver (from the windscreen pillars, etc.)

Does anybody have any ideas how to fake some reasonable looking shadow play that looks three-dimensional? I mostly work in Commotion, but have access to AE and Shake, as well. My best guess so far would be to combine a matte/mask with a filter that can be applied independently to shadows, midtones and highlights.

Thanks,

James

What about just masking a solid color layer and then using a warp or displacement filter to roughly animate it?

One thing that's worth doing is shooting (or finding on YouTube or something) some reference video to see what it really does looks like for real. A lot of times our assumptions about what something looks like are a bit off, which leads to creating effects that don't look realistic.