How to paint video frames

[Michael Szalapski]

Do you mean to have footage look as though it is an animated painting or do you mean you want the footage to arrive on the screen in splatters?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Francisco Duenas]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for being so prompt. I mean to have footage look as though it is an

animated painting.

Francisco

[First Last]

First thing that comes to mind is Stan Brackage’s (spelling?) painted and scratched film strips. If that’s the look your going for, I’d consider using Photoshop CS4, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be done within After Effects. The only reason I’d use Photoshop for this is because it should give you more options for manipulating each frame.

If your trying to get “normal” footage to look like it’s been painted, go crazy and experiment with some filters in After Effects.

Production Associate
Bend, Oregon, United States

[Michael Szalapski]

Dave’s answer is good. If you don’t need it to look very realistic a very quick way to achieve this effect is to duplicate your footage layer. Set the layer’s blending mode to “darken” and then apply a blur effect, such as fast blur. As you raise the blur level it begins to take on a painted/sketched look (for SD footage, I’ve found that 15-ish works, depending on the footage. (You’d also probably want the entire thing to be about 10 frames per second instead of 30.)

It’s a strange trick, but it’s one of my more fun ones.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Todd Kopriva]

The Cartoon effect and the RE:Vision Effects Video Gogh effect are both worth a look for this kind of thing.

One thing to keep in mind: Applying one effect seldom gives the aesthetic results that you want. Play with several effects and their settings and see what building blocks you have available to build out your vision.

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Simon Stutts]

On a tangential note…

The Talk to Chuck ads were originally done by these guys.

https://www.flatblackfilms.com/

They’re using proprietary software (“Rotoshop”) – it’s the same software and team that did “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly.” (although according to their website, C. Schwab replaced them on the latest batch of spots with a cheaper lookalike competitor…)

-stutts-

[Francisco Duenas]

Thanks so much Dave! I’m watching the tutorials now.
Cheers!

Francisco

[Francisco Duenas]

Dan, I appreciate your prompt response. I’ll experiment with this.Thank you!

Francisco

[Francisco Duenas]

Thank you Simon, that looks amazing.Too bad its restricted.

Thanks!

Francisco

[Francisco Duenas]

Thanks Mike,

I’ll definitely try this.

Cheers!

Francisco