Simple Green Screen Butterfly

I made this animated butterfly for an upcoming project. I decided to build a larger model than what would appear on screen, shoot it in front of a green screen, and shrink it down in post. I thought this process would be easier than building a tiny model and trying to animate it on set. Also, this model needed to be suspended in mid air with wires and removing wires on a green screen is relatively easy to do. Although the process looks somewhat difficult, with the right software it is actually very simple.

I started with my model suspended on a wire. I have already removed the wire so it is not visible in this example. I animated the butterfly and brought the completed frames into After Effects.

In After Effects, I shrunk the butterfly down to about 5% percent of it's original size. I then animated the flight path simply by changing the butterflies position and adding keyframes along the timeline. You can change the curve of the path by dragging the bezier handles at the beginning and end of the path.

I removed the green screen with the Keylight 1.2 effect in After Effects. It is one of the easiest plugins to use. All you need to do is choose the color you would like to remove by selecting the eye dropper next to the "Screen Colour" swatch and choose the color you would like to remove from within your animation. There are several adjustment tools to play with to get the exact look you want.

I then added the background and changed the color from purple to yellow using the Photo Filter effect. I also adding a glow to enhance the light reflecting off of the wings.

Here is a video of the different stages of development.