midterm storyboard

Here is my storyboard for my midterm project. I planned to take a video of my friend dancing, then rotoscope the video. I wanted to make the background on solid color and create outlines on the dancer. That way the result would look like an outlined drawing dancing like a real person.

midterm rotoscope

Here are some screen shots of my midterm rotoscoping project. The first image is the actual video that I filmed and used for the project. The second image is the first frame in my After Effects project, the third image is the last frame in the project.

Also, here is a link to youtube of the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpetyBhJ13A&feature=youtu.be

For my midterm for Time Media, I knew I wanted to use rotoscoping in some way. I was interested in the idea of using Adobe Photoshop to rotoscope a video. With that technique, the final video would be like a line drawing that did some kind of movement. My idea was that I would take a video of my friend dancing, edit it to a short clip, then bring it into Photoshop and draw each frame with the brush tool on a new layer. I would make the background one solid color, the girl would have a basic outline on her using different colors, and the outlined figure would dance around.

As I started working on this project, I decided to use After Effects instead of Photoshop. I found that I could get the same effect that I wanted just by using a different technique. In after effects, I edited my video down to 7 seconds and used the rotoscope brush to rotoscope the girl. I went frame by frame editing the rotoscope so that her silhouette was perfect. When I was finished with that, I made the background black and the girl white, like a mask. I put layer styles on her to make a black stroke around her. Then I put the cartoon effect on her, in black and white, and on her edges, editing the radius and thresholds, leaving a little bit of detail showing on her. After that, I wrote her name and put a stroke and a drop shadow on it. Then I positioned the name where I wanted it in relation to the girl and parented the video to the text. Then I keyframed the text and made it zoom out so that you could read the whole thing. Lastly, I made a still image of the last frame and held it there for about 2 seconds at the end of the video. At the end, my video came out to be 9 seconds long.

I'm happy with the way my project turned out, I was able to get the exact effect that I wanted. This is something that could be used in the future for another project or to lead in to something else. The difficulty I had was the amount of time it actually took to go through all of the frames frame by frame to edit them all. Also, It took me a little bit of time to figure out how to get a still image of the last frame so that it would hold there for a couple of seconds.

For my final project, I'm planning on using the same video that I took and used for my midterm. I'm going to rotoscope it again but i'm going to be redoing the rotoscope. I really like the look of the rotoscope in Photoshop using the paint brush and painting over the video frame by frame. I'm going to edit another section from the video and bring it into Photoshop and do the rotoscoping. I'm going to make the background and everything besides the drawing transparent. Then I am going to make a background of a stage. I'll take a picture of a real stage and put it behind the drawing. The end product will look like a line drawing dancing on a real stage.