#6 Rotoscoping

I finally finished it!

15fps

This took so much time, I couldn't make a post last week. Now that I'm finished with it, I can talk about the torturous workflow I had to go through. And if you don't want to read it, all I can say is that rotoscoping sucks.

So this is what happened.

I asked my buddy, Humza, to do something in front of the iMac's camera. He did some weird eyebrow dance for, about, ten seconds. When we were done recording on Photo Booth, I moved the video clip onto Photoshop. I think Photo Booth automatically records at fifteen frames-per-second so I was grateful for that when I noticed that those were the video settings on PS. At this point, I realized that ten seconds is a lot, so I decided to shorten the clip to two seconds, trying my best to make the video look like it loops just by where I decided to start and end it.

After that, I created a video layer, which is the one I would use to draw on. To not make the video distract me so much, I lowered its opacity to 30%. Then, with the new video layer I had on top, I began tracing my buddy's face frame by frame. The eyebrows were on a different layer so I could play with them without screwing anything else up. The body was also a static layer underneath the face's video layer. I only colored the whole thing, because the lines of the body were showing up behind the face as it moved. This reminds me that I forgot to color the whites of the eyes.

Oh well...

All in all, it was extremely boring. I don't know how people work on rotoscoping without passing out from boredom. It's a lot of work, and the feeling of accomplishment isn't as much as when you create something from your imagination (for me, at least). At least there's no doubt that the animation is going to end up looking good since you're basically just recreating the video reference.

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I think I'm done with learning the basics for photoshop. I want to learn more complicated things about it so next week, I'm going to try to mimic other people's animation style. My plan is to find three animators and make a short animation for each one of them to learn how they do things. Next week, the new season of Animating on PS begins!