Updated Work Reel for End of March

It's been far too long since the last work reel post. There is still a lot of things not in the reel yet like cleaned and colored animations. I'm still looking for folks who can help me with that. There's a lot to color and the more help I get the faster the film gets done. There is still a little more than 30 days left to work on the film before the deadline so it's back to the animation table for me!

Compositing in After Effects

I spent about 6 hours this morning taking a lot of the colored frames and renaming them, sequencing them, and then compositing them in After Effects. My clean up animator, Paul Blair, has also offered his services with batching the clean ups in Photoshop and coloring them too. SERIOUS TEAMWORK!! About 1 minute of the film is completely finished. Here are four of the finished shots I worked on this morning.

Experimenting with Compositing Modes = Awesome!

So while tweaking my work reel I thought I'd find a way to make the colored animation tests of the acrobats doing their stuff blend in a little more seamlessly. Normally you would drop all the PNGs into After Effects and sequence them into a video there but I did it in iStopmotion as a test and planned to do it in AE later. Lo and behold something strangely cool resulted on this. Even though this images were PNG files (which preserves the transparency) and had no background, iStopmotion hasn't figured this out yet and just fills the empty space with black. This wouldn't be the case with After Effects. I put the test into the work reel for a temporary placeholder and I tried playing around with the compositing modes so you can at least see the watercolor background beneath it. I was surprised by the results.

This is what the original test looks like. Note the black background.

The watercolor painting is brought into Final Cut and placed beneath the video clip.

Right clicking on the video clip and then selecting Difference in the Composite drop down menu.

See the difference! (^_^ lol, no pun intended)

It looks really interesting now because the inverted texture of the watercolor in the background can be seen in the acrobat. So spooky! But now the colors need a little adjusting. In the Effects menu, scroll down to Video Filters followed by Color Correction and selected the Color Corrector filter.

Using this tool I can change the color and value a bit to make the acrobat a little easier to see. I'm just going to adjust the value and saturation controls.

Here are the comparisons between the different stages.

And here is the final product.