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  • Hand Drawn Animation Compositing onto Video Photography

    Posted by Grace Mathis on September 4, 2015 at 10:22 am

    For my current project I would like to do hand generated frame by frame animation which I would like to place over some video photography I have made. However, I am not sure of the best and most efficient way to do this?
    Currently I am planning on printing out the individual frames which I break down from the video and draw over the top, and scan it in. However, I am not sure if the ink of the printed paper will work with my style?

    I was planning on drawing my animation on paper (maybe trace) and then scanning in and digitally compositing in after effects or premiere pro, however I would have the issue of removing white negative space from all the frames. As it would be sooo time consuming to remove all the white (e.g. via photoshop) from all the frames I am wondering if there is a quicker way to do this – maybe through a selection tool which can detect the white space, and preferably in a way which I can do this to an entire video rather than individual frames?

    Does anyone else know any other good technquies? If anyone knows how to composite my animation frames digitally over the top of my video (rather than printing off everything?). I am open to all suggestions!

    Here is a link to a video which is an example of the animation over video photography style (even though I can see it is digitally created) which gives you an idea of what I am trying to achieve! https://vimeo.com/134249582

    Thanks so much guys!

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    Grace Mathis replied 10 years, 9 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Mark Suszko

    September 5, 2015 at 3:00 am

    Grace, this program was made for you:

    https://synthetik.com/

    Studio Artist. really powerful and flexible, will let you not just trace and rotoscope, but actually convert stills into animated oil and watercolor paintings as well, and so much more.

    But if that doesn’t fit your budget or style, you could use something like iStopmotion, yes, that is a stop-motion animation program, but one which has an “onion skin” mode, that lets you trace imported video frames and sort of rotoscope, in a semi-automated way.

    Toon Boom is another option I strongly recommend.

    If drawing on paper is your “thing”… well, you *could* draw on chromakey-green-colored paper! Or, use white paper and only green ink. Then you just combine all your scans into one file in your software of choice, (Quicktime Pro might do this, or just create a separate bin in FCP7 and import the scans with a pre-set 2-frame duration, then drag that bin to the timeline and render) …and remove the background via the chromakey effect, leaving you a clean animation with alpha to superimpose on your new backgrounds. Stark black and white art with thick lines could also be handled using simple luminance keying, or changing the “blending mode” of the video layer.

    When you save frames, you need to start the first named frame with enough digits to keep all the following frames straight. For example, I would make my first frame with a name like Test0000000.tif. The next would be Test0000001.tif, and so forth. If you just start with “test1.tif, test 2.tif, test3.tif…”, as soon as you get to ten, a hundred, a thousand frames, your frame order in the bin will start getting scrambled, over and over.

    I hope these ideas helped. Please show us some stills or a short clip, when you finally get it going!

  • Grace Mathis

    September 6, 2015 at 5:40 am

    Thanks so much Mark!
    You’ve given me some awesome ideas and helped a lot 🙂 . I will have to give them a try and I will let you know how I go 🙂

    Thanks again!

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