Another film-look question – This week, A Scanner Darkly

[Gary Oberbrunner]

Hi Ben — I know this isn’t our forum 🙂 so please forgive me, but you did mention Sapphire — if you have Avid or Shake, try the new Sapphire Cartoon plug-in in Sapphire v2 on those platforms. It won’t get you all the way to the Waking Life look, but it’s a good start. (And it won’t take hours per frame like that Waking Life/Scanner Darkly look probably does.)

— Gary O (GenArts)

— Gary

[Ben Scott]

Thanks Gary,

I’ll have a play-around with it. Can I just say that they are the best set of filters I have ever owned?

Cheers,

Ben

[Peter Mcauley]

Hi Ben,

You might want to try using a combination of two filters to achieve this effect. First I would apply the Median filter and then I would stack on top of that the Posterize filter. This should at least bring you close to the look that we saw in the Scanner Darkly film. The preset that I would suggest using from the Median filter is called “even_spots” and setting the mix with original to 30. The Posterize filter can be left at it’s default setting or you might want to try using the “posterizeIrisRegion” preset.

Although I mentioned adding the Posterize filter, you should be pretty close to the effect that you are trying to emulate with the Median alone. The Posterize filter just makes the result look a little nicer in my opinion.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Peter.

[Ben Scott]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your advice.

However, I seem to be crashing Boris whenever I try to use the median filter (among others). May be time for a clean install to get rid of some problematic AE filters and other bits and pieces that seem to be annoying Boris.

Will try as soon as it’s sorted though. Thanks for taking the time to answer.

Ben

[Cory Mckechnie]

Another way i’ve found to be effective (although not in Avid or Boris) is to export an image sequence of what you want to “cartoon” and then use Photoshop to alter the image to what you want. Then batch process the entire image sequence.

I believe there is an exact tutorial somewhere (maybe even here at the Cow) that explains the process. I find Photoshop will give you a ton of options for configuring what you want it to look like.

Cory