Animation in Photoshop [Week 2]

Adding drawn elements to video.

The first task involved adding drawn elements to video. The tools we used to do this we had already learned about last week, so this process was fairly straight-forward, and familiar. We also practiced adding effects to video clips using smart layers, as well as things like hue and saturation.

For my particular piece, I decided to make the main element a big light streak emanating from the tuk-tuk as it passed the camera, which was inspired by the light cycles in Tron. There was more I wanted to add, but due to making some annoying mistakes during the process, I didn't end up getting time to add anything else in-class.

I did add a couple of extra elements, such as highlighting the lights on the bridge, but with so many frames and not that much time, there was not much else I could do.

Rotoscoping

For our next task, we did another looping walk cycle similarly to last week. This time though, we didn't make use of the puppet warp feature or an animation guide, and just drew over video footage frame-by-frame.

Even though I wasn't trying to be super accurate, tracing over each frame with a mouse alone was still quite difficult, and by the end my arm was aching a bit. Overall though I was happy with how it turned out.

The part I was most happy with was the colours, which I did by creating several different colour mixes using the "Kyle's Ultimate Pastel Palooza" and "Kyle's Paintbox - Wet Blender 50" brushes. I then cycled between each one over the period of a few frames each.

I employed a very similar process with the background too, which included using the same two brushes to paint in and then mix the colours together. As I still wanted the man to be clearly visible, I erased the edges to create a vignette effect and reduced the opacity of the background layers.

Moving with a feeling

When researching for ideas, I found a couple of interesting artists such as Matthias Brown. Eventually though I found some cool looking rotoscoped animations of hands, which served as the main reason why I eventually settled on making my hand the subject of my piece.

 

For this task, the first thing we had to do was get footage to rotoscope over. Before I decided to focus on hands, I tried recording a few other things such as me sitting idly on my phone or a shot of me from the shoulders up looking at the camera, but when reviewing what I had recorded, I didn't feel like it'd be conducive to a good animation. 

I ultimately just recorded my hand opening and closing several times, which I intended to rotoscope over first, and then add some cool effects within the palm of the hand. 

The first major thing I did after putting the footage into photoshop was selecting the part I wanted to animate, which ended up being only a couple instances of the hand opening and closing.

Though my body and lower face were both in shot, I decided to focus just on my lower arm and hand, partly as a way of me having less to draw over, and also as a way of putting more emphasis on the area with the most movement.

Originally I was going to rotoscope both the opening and the closing of the hand. However, part-way through the process, it was suggested by a friend that I should copy and reverse the animation I did of the hand opening in order to create the closing.

Upon testing how it looked, I quite liked the results, and chose to stick with it.

The most fun part was creating the effects. I did try looking for footage I could rotoscope over, but after not really finding anything I liked the look of, I just animated them from scratch. I'm happy I did though, because I personally think the result looks amazing.