Sarah's After Effects Workshop No.2
- Thomas Hughes
- Oct 25, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Dec 6, 2022
The idea behind this workshop with Sarah was to have a go at rotoscoping a second long section of a video. I chose to use a video of a friend skiing down a mountain as the contrast between her dark clothes and the white snow should make it easier down the line.
To make sure the composition is set up correctly I needed to go into preferences and select 'Preserve constant Vertex and Feather Point Count when Editing Mask'. This allows me to get a clean mask without any variation.
Now the tedious task starts when I have to select which 1 second bit of footage I want to use. Going through each frame (24 in total) I had to create an outline of my friend using the pen tool. Many sections I could copy and paste from the previous frame but as my friend was skiing towards the camera, there was a lot of enlarging to do.
Having created a simple masked rotoscope of my friend. I wanted to remove the background and place her on top of a digital landscape. I also looped the clip by making sure the rotoscoped clip went off both sides of the page.
In my own time, I now wanted to look at ways I could add effects to the skier. Trying to keep in style with the background without making everything unrecognisable. To start with I used effects such as 'Find Edges' and 'Glow' which eventuated the outline of the skier. I further turned the 'Glow' off and on like a slow strobe light, helping the skier to stand out from the background. However, I felt that the skier stood out too much from the black background so I changed it to white. The creamy/white strokes didn't look quite right so I got rid of them as to not overcomplicate the composition.
To bring everything together, I researched how to add motion blur to the composition. To add the blur I went to layers > Switches > Motion Blur. To change the motion blur settings, I then went to Composition > Composition settings > Advanced, then changed the shutter angle to increase the blur and the shutter phase to change the direction of the blur.
Comments