Rotoscoping with Sara
The second process and production lesson with Sara was about rotoscoping. The aim was to film our own footage and use it in an animation using the rotoscoping technique. This is when an element of a video is cut out of the video frame so you are left with just the moving item you selected. This is then used in animations and effects can be added to it and it can end up looking really cool.
I thought about what I wanted to film as we had to take footage of something moving during the class. I decided to take footage of me walking and to cut out the feet. I was wearing my Doc Martins that day and thought it would be cool to just cut out the shoes so it looked like two shoes walking/stomping on their own. Here is the original footage of this.
Once the footage was put onto my computer I opened up After effects. I then imported the footage into the composition. We needed the video to be in a constant loop so Sara showed us how to do this. I had to shorten my footage because at points my shoes crossed and Sara said this could cause problems when rotoscoping. Then for each frame of my two moving shoes we had to cut the shoe out using pen tool. It was similar to outlining something on illustrator, using the pen tool which I have a lot of experience with. This step is quite tedious but also simple so I found it easy to do. I was left with two shoes detached from the legs and background moving in a loop.
We then had to add backgrounds and effects, which was done without Sara's help. When I thought of my Docs I imagine this work could be used for some sort of Doc Martin ad, so decided to go for a kind of grungy/rock aesthetic using a crinkled paper background which made me think of school, and the shoes rebelling against it. I then decided to make the background spin, to add more dimension and movement to the piece. I then drew out some lightning bolts out on the composition and coloured them yellow. I placed them in different positions on the screen so that every time a shoe 'stomped' the lighting bolts would come out which I thought was a cool punky idea. Here is my final outcome uploaded on vimeo!
Doc Martin Stomp Animation from Abigail lee on Vimeo.
Evaluating my work, I am proud of being able to complete the steps given and to also add extra things to the video that I learnt from previous lessons. I do regret that the video is only 5 seconds long not 10, as I ran out of time. I also wish that the original video was better quality because it has hard to tell the defining features of the doc martin shoe because its so blurry.
