Triage the footage
Forty shots sorted into fix, leave and replace. Nine were dropped rather than rescued.
Coastline Clean-up
Archive and drone footage cleaned up for a documentary short, without sanding off what made it feel real.
Client
Blue Coast Initiative
Year
2025
Our role
Rotoscoping, clean-up, restoration
Deliverables
Documentary short, 40 shots
The brief
A conservation short built from donated footage of wildly different quality. Some of it had rigs, wires and timecode burnt into frame.
The approach
We set a rule early: remove what distracts, keep what dates. Grain, wobble and imperfect exposure stayed. Wires, logos and burnt-in timecode went.
Roto by hand where it counts
Hair and water edges done manually. Automatic mattes failed on both.
Preserve the texture
Grain matched and reapplied after clean-up so restored shots sit with untouched ones.
Selected frames
The result
The short cut together as one piece despite five source formats. It screened at two festivals.
40Shots handled
5Source formats unified
2Festival screenings
It still looks like our footage, which is what we were afraid of losing.
Director, Blue Coast Initiative
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