The same footage, a different problem.

After the helicopter composite I wanted to go deeper into Nuke — specifically screen replacement, which requires a different kind of precision than object compositing. A tracked screen has to move with the phone, survive motion blur, and still look like glass rather than a flat image dropped on top.

The content playing on the screen is the helicopter footage from the previous project. A convenient reuse, and a small continuity between the two.

Making a screen look used

The replacement was built in Nuke using a corner pin track to lock the new content to the phone's movement through the shot. The part that took the most iteration was preserving the original screen's reflections — rather than painting them out, they were extracted and composited back on top of the replacement, so the glass reads as glass.

Smudges and fingerprint imperfections were added in a separate pass. They're a small detail but they're also what the eye uses to confirm it's looking at a real object. Without them the screen sits slightly too clean against the worn edges of the phone.

A contained problem, solved carefully

Screen replacement is a narrow technical exercise but it demands the same attention as larger compositing work — if anything, more, because the audience knows exactly what a phone screen is supposed to look like. Getting it wrong is obvious. Getting it right is invisible.