Floating mouth effect?

[Rachel Adams]

Thanks, that’s really helpful.

The mouth can get covered its going to disappear when it does, that shouldn’t be too much on a problem from the footage. At the moment you see i’ve been doing it frame by frame with the quick selection tool in photoshop to make the animation however the problem with that system is it looks very a-ha video, rather than smooth flash animation.

Thanks again, Rachel

[Rachel Adams]

The ‘a-ha’ effect (from the music video from the 1980s where comic book characters come to life) may actual be called jitter(?) when the animation shakes in that hand drawn way, I want to eliminate that making it look much more like a smooth shifting shape.

I am thinking that if i put a smoothing effect on photoshop this might do the trick. However the other problem i’m having is the quality, i don’t know what size screen its going to be viewed on (which is why i was keen on flash or after effects to make vector shapes rather than raster) so I could keep the quality up.

Hope that explains my thinking a bit.
Rachel

[Micah Mcdowell]

Sounds like motion blur in After Effects may help make your animation more smooth and less jittery like the old “Take on Me” video (a classic, by the way).

In Photoshop, you’re doing the same basic thing they did in that video with each frame hand-drawn, giving no interpolation or motion blur… kind of like a really fast shutter speed on a camera. Adding motion blur in Photoshop would not do the same thing. Using masks in After Effects will make it more natural and easy to tweak as well. Also, ditto on everything Dave said.

[Rachel Adams]

Thanks for all the advice all of these things are really useful. The video is a David Bowie video which i have turned into a series of stills. Its like a simplified portrait you see for an art video.

Am i right in thinking the basic thought then is to either use flash frame by frame or to take my existing photoshop footage and use it with masks in after effects? Is that correct? So do i use a motion blur mask in after affects.

I will try out all of these things!

I also love that A-ha video but for this instance the jittery affect would be too hand drawn, it needs to be more mechanical and smooth to work with the rest of my animation (i think).

[Mark Suszko]

Your footage probably doesn’t support this, but I though maybe a trick to try would be to use the color picker tool on just the lip color to make the lips the source of a moving matte… essentially chromakeying using red lip color instead of blue or green. Use a tight multipoint garbage mask around the mouth to help filter out similar color. That key could then drive lips of any color you want when appied to cut a key with another solid in the comp… but I’m not an AE guy (yet), just musing out loud…

What you’re trying to do sounds lots like the old “synchro-vox” technique from the Clutch Cargo and Space Angel cartoons of my youth in the early 60’s.

They used to parody this effect on Conan O’Brien. But the synchro vox as I understand it was based on luminance keying of people wearing high-contrast makup around the mouth and lips. It was a technique developed to speed the proces of making saturday morning animated cartoons on a tight schedule without needing to hand-draw and ink a lot of key frames for the dialogue scenes.