We looked at the Franz Ferdinand music video "Take me out" as an example of rotoscoping being used, this gave us a basic idea of what we were going to create.
The first thing we did was collect our footage, we were instructed to use small pieces of video or sections of selected footage which didn't last very long, this made rotoscoping easier and would make the rotoscope look a lot more fluid.
First we looked at the settings of our composition before we started rotoscoping, we ensured that we changed our frame rate and elected the Conform to frame rate button. These settings were very important in ensuring that our comp was set up properly.
The next step was importing out footage into after effects, we did this by going to file>Import and then choosing the file we wanted to work with. Now our footage was ready to be edited
and rotoscoped. I also used the shortcut Alt>square bracket keys left or right to clip my footage, this made my footage shorter and easier to work with.
This is the Stretch tool we used it to make our footage faster or slower depending on how we wanted our outcome to look, the lower the number the faster the speed the higher the number the slower it went. Because I wanted a walk pace I used 200 I felt that this was a high enough number for it to be not too slow but not too fast.
We were told that these were the most important settings when we were first setting our after effects file up, we needed to ensure that the button called "PRESERVE CONSTANT VERTES" was un-ticked, this made it so the keyframe before the last one wasn't deleted and all of the footage remained in tact. After we had untucked this we could click ok and carry on with our creation.
At this point of the rotoscope I felt very comfortable with what I was making, because I am used to using a lot of the pen tool in Illustrator I got to grips with using this pen tool quite easily
We used the Pen tool in after effects to create our mask, we then moved the playback head until we got to a point where the character we were tracing moved slightly out of the pen lines, we then adjusted the lines of the pen outline so that the new position of the character matched up with the new pen tool lines. I repeated this until I was happy with the outcome and that the looped effect was sufficient. The set the time originally to 2 seconds but in my case I found that it took another second to be fully complete. After we had completed the pen tool outlines we made a new composition and dragged the original comp into the timeline. We could now interchange between the two compositions and anything I edited on the previous comp was now updated on the new comp as well.
In the new comp we made the length of the composition 10 seconds and then used the Time remap tool which was situation on the 3 little lines on the main comp button, we created new keyframes so that the last keyframe wasn't blank, this made the animation finish on an action shot and made the whole thing loop and work all together.
I added a black solid by using the Layer solid tool and used the toggle switches and mode and trakmat to make a silhouette in the shape of the character, I preferred this to the actual character because it made the effect of the desert more realistic and the implication of the character being hot and shadowed under the sun.
This is my final looped animation, Overall I am happy with the outcome and the process we went through was pretty understandable, I feel that If I was to use this method in the future I would be much more prepared. The background and the characters movements work well together and the composition as a whole works together. I enjoyed this process and production and I feel that I could use rotoscoping in the future if I needed to.
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