Creating an isolated animation from high key or low key video?

[Juris Eksts]

If you have access to a green screen, and chroma-key the shot, it would be a cleaner separation of image than shooting against black or white.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

In an ideal world:
– Person in red outfit
– Golfclub painted red
– Shot against green
– Shot with a highspeed camera or at least a standard camera with a high shutter speed like 1/1000th or shorter; You’d have issues with the speed of the club and blurring otherwise

I think you’ll have keying issues keying off black or white. Luma keys are hit-or-miss unless you have a really controlled setting.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
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[Mark Suszko]

You could light the golfer so as to throw his shadow on the white, and just shoot the slightly keystoned shadow but I agree green screening is a better bet here.

[Mike Smith]

Really, for it to look good – stylish, showing what you want to show – won’t you be wanting to hand draw the silhouette over the video as a guide in any event …?

If so, getting the details of whatever it is they want to show or see in the end product right, so that it will be visible in silhouette after you’ve hand drawn your animation, may be more of a concern than anything else.

[Andy Kelly]

So you would suggest tracing over every frame (it’s going to be around 5 seconds long and at 50fps so around 250 frames)

The best way to describe exactly what I’m trying to do is using a couple of examples. So it will need to be black on a coloured background with a 2d look, so no shadows. A bit like the iPod commercials..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD4kBNbNZPU&feature=related

The shot will be framed side on like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2o1SYXaOHE (not in slow motion)

Sorry for the confusion, this is just something unlike anything I have never attempted before

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[Mike Smith]

That’s a lot of drawing.

Something like ToonBoom, Stickman or Anime Studio would let you do that with simple figures with “bones” or skeletons that you can create, pose in key frames, and then hit render for output.

Though you could now probably get a decent effect from AE with its RotoBrush tool off pretty well any reasonably contrasty footage and save yourself the drawing.

https://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/17425-how-to-make-ipod-ads-rewrite-with-images/
https://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-make-an-ipod-video-ad/
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/rotobrush_ae_cs5_douglas.html

[Mark Suszko]

When the arms cross in front of the body silhouette, you will lose their outline… is this a problem?

[Mark Suszko]

There is a technique called “poor man’s mocap”. Put tape on the key parts and joints of the golfer and his club, and record his swing. Import that footage and project it onto a flat plane in your 3-d animation program of choice, say, Lightwave, or maybe Poser, or Maya. Use the frame by frame playback to guide you in keyframing the model body to match the video, then delete the video, now you have a 3-d model with the same action, visible from many angles, as a a flat 2-d cartoon or in 3-d.

[Jason Diebler]

Option #2: There is already existing stock footage of exactly what you are looking for. In 10 seconds with a google search, I found a silhouetted golf swing on Shutterstock. This could save you time and effort.