I continued to rack my brains as to how to handle Leia’s cinemagraph but I could quickly get the cinemagraph of Kane in the Alien Egg Chamber over the finish line with relatively little trouble. The heavy lifting had already been accomplished when I’d been able to figure out a good solution for the laser smoke surface effect over the eggs when I was working on the background for Vader’s cinemagraph, so it was simply a matter of importing the precomp from that project over to this one.
Since Kane, in his bulky spacesuit, was carefully balancing on the girder/platform, he couldn’t have much movement apart from moving his flashlight around to look at the eggs. I puppet pinned his arms to give him a little life and moved his head from side to side, but the main challenge for this one ended up being trying to match the circle of light the flashlight is throwing on the laser smoke layer to his hand movements.
I ended up being able to use the video footage of the rising smoke that I’d used previously in Vader’s and Luke’s cinemagraphs once again, this time masking it off and fading it in and out in a breathing rhythm for the exhaust trail that comes out of the back of his helmet.
To make it a little more dramatic and scary, I darkened the background and vignetted the entire comp to give it a haunted house kind of feel.
Now I had no choice to but deal with Leia’s cinemagraph! Thinking about the way I added Vader to Luke’s cinemagraph gave me the idea I should include Kenobi and the stormtrooper as well to reallytell a story. That was the idea I needed.