General techniques

Choosing the render engine

I initially started the project with EEVEE exclusively, as it is faster than Cycles. I ended up switching to Cycles for certain scenes for the following reasons :

• Overall, the raytraced lighting is better in Cycles ;
• Light-emitting meshes give better results in Cycles (useful for backgrounds) ;
• Smoke and fire simulations look better in Cycles ;
• I worked with very short and simple scenes, which means the slightly longer render time was not an issue.

I got very good results with 32 samples and denoising in Cycles, which is fast to render. The default value is 4096 samples, which is excessive here.

Choosing the framerate

The original opening has 23.98 fps, I chose this framerate in Blender (output/format/frame rate) to make it match easily.

Scene and reference videos

I decided to use a different blend file for each shot of video, as it seemed easier to manage.

I cut the original opening to obtain a reference clip for each scene, then imported it with Object mode/Add/Image/Reference. Then, in the object data properties, click match movie length to get the clip length of this scene. Finally, use this value as the end of your timeline, so that the Blender scene duration matches with the reference.

Warning

Blender will only take into account the scene frame rate to play the reference video. For example, if your reference is 23.98 fps and your scene is at 60 fps, the reference will be sped up when playing in Blender.

This is why I chose to animate scenes at the framerate of the original video : it avoids complications.

Using a screenshot as a light-emitting background

Although you can use an image as background in the compositor, it can be useful to import your background as a mesh in your scene : it will be compatible with camera shaking, and can even emit secondary lighting to better integrate the characters in the scene.

To add a mesh background : Object mode/Add/Image/Mesh, then customize the material with the following parameters :

• Roughness = 1 : the background should not reflect light in a specular way ;
• IOR = 1 : for some reason the index of refraction impacts the contrast of the image. This might be because of the relation between IOR and reflectivity. Setting it to 1 restores the original contrast of the image.
• Emission color = Image color : this will make the mesh emit light of the same color as the image, which can be useful to provide natural lighting in a scene.
• Emission strength = 1 : this makes the rendered mesh as bright as the original image. If you need to increase it (for example to light characters), the image will appear brighter and will eventually turn white, which makes it unsuitable to use as a background.