Week 8 - Assessment Submission

Well, I've finally gotten around to submitting. It's taken a while, (A combination of sickness, unrelentingly busy life and work) and I can't say I'm all that happy with it. But I made a serious mistake trying to use the rotoscoping tool on camcorder footage.

Warning to all future vfx artists. Never. Ever. Use that with the camcorder footage. You will find yourself in hell.

But, me being the dogged person that I am, ran with it, and after what has to have been around five days of hardcore frame by frame rotoscoping, I got something that looked like a dogs breakfast.

Nonetheless, it was an interesting experience, and once I can get to the more functional parts of using after effects, things become a lot easier, the process of creating something that looks excessively kiddish entirely in after effects (with initial cutting in premiere) was a tricky one, but it seems to have worked.

The rotoscoping tool is quite powerful, regardless of my irritations, most of it's limitations revolve around edges where the colour differentiation was minimal. In a white black contrast situation it would run perfectly. It's intelligence is selective, sometimes it does what you wanted, other times it seems to do the exact opposite. Even in situations where the colour differentiation was minimal, different shades of black, for instance, it still ran like a champ, but required hand painting of the edges. Since I couldn't find a way to change the brush, this was a bit like wielding a sledgehammer for something a rapier would have been more appropriate for. I'm personally just happy I was able to rotoscope a hand mask. Holy **** that is a pain in the rear end. A combination of poor footage, movement, glare burnout, and poor pixel resolution, as well as a chugging program, meant that the process was a slow, and painful one. I went through many episodes and films while waiting for the tool to generate for each frame, I can tell you.

So. Things to learn for next time.

Greenscreen.

Greenscreen.

Greenscreen.


And ummm. Shoot in hi-def with a proper camera, anything with a proper lens. The hi-res footage, though slower to work with, allows one to work with a much higher information base, clearer footage, and a generally produces better results, faster. Additionally, colour shifting with footage like this is miles easier.

Youtube video here.