For this session we needed to bring two things to the session, one being a short piece of copyright free footage that looped and we had to make sure the subject of the footage was not obscured as we needed to cut out the whole figure for the roto scoping. We also were asked to prepare a background created in Illustrator for the subject of the footage to feature in.
I found it quite difficult to find a suitable piece of footage that was copyright free even though I looked on multiple websites. I ended up with a looping video of an antelope/gazelle type animal found on a royalty-free footage website although when I downloaded it still featured a watermark so to rectify this and to avoid copyright issues I filled in animal figure using the track mat feature to change the work.
For the background I created a desert/grass plain landscape, and added in a tree and some water as I wanted to place more animals in the setting to make it more interesting which I may still do if I can find suitable royalty free footage.
In the session we were shown an example of rotoscoping (rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films) used in a Kylie Minogue music video where multiple version of her have been essentially 'cut out' and placed in the same background/setting.
The first thing we did was import our footage as mine was a video I imported 'as footage'. We set the frame rate to 25 fps and made the video have a 2 second duration. To do this we had to slow the footage down and stretch it by going to Paragraph- column- stretch and changing the value to 200.
We then had to pick which frame would be our first one when rotoscoping, something where all the limbs had been extended and were visible was suggested, we then had to press the star key (*) to mark this layer. After we had done this we went to the After Effects drop down menu at the top and went to preferences- general- then unticked the 'preserve constant vertex and feather point count when editing masks'. This mean that we could now alter the points on each individual frame and therefore have greater accuracy in cutting the subject out.
We had to the begin drawing round our cutting out our figure. We used the pen tool for this, and selected the layer, moving the playback head at the star marked point, and were instructed to try and use as few points as possible around the shape. This part was quite time consuming, and difficult at times when the limbs were crossed over for example.
We then looked at mask tools and functions. We went to the mask option, drop down menu where the 'add' option would remove the background and the subtract option would do the opposite. We then selected the animate mask property and selected mask one, activate mask path.
We then saved the project and went to the mask selection and chose add. Then we selected on the mask path and held down the control key and clicked on any frame. A drop down menu appeared and we selected 'toggle hold key frame'. This meant the subject of our footage was now able to be placed in the background we had created. Next we created a new composition with a duration of ten seconds, which was the composition from which we would then be able to output the video. Firstly we dragged our original composition in to the timeline, then imported the backgrounds we had created previously.
To make our rotoscoped figure loop within the 10 second comp we used time remapping. To do this we selected layer - new - time - enable time remapping. We then added a new key frame and added an expression to loop. We used the expression dictionary and selected menu- property - loop out - duration. This allowed us to extend motion for the duration of the timeline. The final thing we looked at was using track mats to add colour/texture to our rotoscope figure, making sure the colour/texture sat below the rotoscope layer and was the size of the comp.
Overall I found this session quite challenging and managed to keep up with instruction only by writing down everything as it was said so then I could refer back to it. I think the techniques we learnt were quite useful although I prefer the rotoscoping in Photoshop session we did last year as it seemed more simple than doing it on After Effects. As for my outcome I am fairly happy with how it turned out but would maybe like to have tried making it so the animal figure looked as though it was walking across the landscape, not just in the same position over and over.
