What I did:

I’ve been thinking about the transition from John’s face in the nursing home bed to the front-on view of the memory cabinet. In my animatic, I used a fade between two shots with the memory cabinet as the anchor point. It sits on the far right of the frame as the camera dollies back out of the doorway, and I used a pan from left to right to match into the front-on view.

I’m considering whether a hard cut might work better. The IAM badge (hero prop) is in a similar screen position across both shots, although not an exact match, as the angle and size differ slightly. It may be close enough that it could work as a near-match cut, where the badge stitches the two shots together visually. I won’t know until I see it with the music.

The bigger (and more stressful) task was working out how to keep the IAM badge in full colour while everything else desaturates, using a test render. Doing this with a manual mask across a nearly four-minute animation isn’t ideal with the time constraints I’m working to.

Desired effect (achieved here with manual masking):

 

I attempted rendering the whole scene, minus the IAM badge, and then rendering just the badge and cabinet (for shadows) as a separate file to comp in After Effects, but this didn’t work because of the lighting.

The solution should be Cryptomatte, a render pass system built into Blender’s Cycles renderer that automatically generates a unique ID for every object in the scene at render stage. You output as an OpenEXR Multilayer file, bring it into After Effects, apply the Cryptomatte effect, click on the object or objects that you want to isolate, and it generates a matte (mask) automatically. The layers in the timeline should be the badge in full colour, then an adjustment layer for the desaturation over time, with the main scene renders at the bottom.

In theory.

Getting it (almost) working in AE 26.0 took considerably longer than expected, involving import settings, colour space issues, and working out exactly which layer the effect needed to be applied to. After a significant amount of ‘frustration’, the concept is almost working – the badge is isolated, albeit on a black background currently (probably due to a setting I’ve missed). That said, the colour of the image is way off the same render as a PNG file.

Cryptomatte in AE:

PNG render:

EXR render (more harsh contrast and saturation):

What I learned:

A match cut needs the audience’s brain to do the work of connecting two shots, which is what makes it powerful. Whether that’s the right choice here over a fade depends on how the scene feels once it’s animated and scored. The music may well carry enough emotional softness to make a hard cut work, but I’m keeping my options open at this stage.

On the technical side, Cryptomatte is (hopefully) the correct tool for the desaturation workflow, manual masking is a less-than-ideal option at this scale. The remaining issue is colour accuracy; I think because the EXR format renders in linear light which looks different to my PNG renders. I need to discuss the best pipeline solution with my supervisor before final renders begin.

Next:

Try to fix the render colour issues and confirm the Cryptomatte pipeline is solid before committing to full renders. And, of course, the asset creation and blocking.

 

Update — March 6th, 2026

Following some further experimentation, a helpful (if not slightly outdated) tutorial I found on YouTube by Simon Eberl, Blender to After Effects | Cryptomattes and a ProEXR product manual from fnord software, I’ve made significant progress on the Cryptomatte colour issue. Adding a Colour Profile Converter effect to the EXR layer in AE and checking ‘Linearize Input Profile’ has brought the render much closer to the correct look. There’s still some colour and contrast issues to work through, but the Cryptomatte pipeline is largely working – the badge is isolated, the desaturation is applying correctly to everything else using the adjustment layer, and crucially the selection carries through the entire sequence automatically once set up on a single frame.

I’m hopeful that this is going to work!

After Effects settings:

Desired effect (now using Cryptomatte):