New puppet and updated backdrop

I took some better pictures of Craig and updated my puppet with the new head. I'm much, much happier with how this looks. It's a lot cleaner now! I'm hoping to find a way to get the eyebrows neatly onto a separate layer so I can animate some better facial expressions. Cutting the eyebrow out is no problem — it's repairing the skin underneath that's proving tricky...

I also tweaked the background some more, adding a few more posters to make it a little less bare. I'm not sure I like it — seems a bit cluttered — but it's got a bit more flavour to it now. The poster on the far left was a happy accident — it just so happened to contain Craig's most used word! There was one that said "Hello, how are you?" in a multitude of different languages but it was really badly designed. I may make one of my own and put it there instead. Then at least I've still got his quote in there if the chat bubble doesn't work out.

Paris scene — French couple

For the Paris scene I needed to somehow create a stereotypical French couple embracing. I was really dreading having to do this and have admittedly been putting it off for a while, as I hadn't a clue how I was going to do it! I ended up using similar techniques to how I created my Craig puppet and simply stitched together a bunch of photographs from Google.


I started with an image of a couple of ballroom dancers as the pose was quite similar to the sort of thing I wanted.

I began with this:

(I love this — it's so hilariously awful)

And finished with this:

I lost count of how many pictures I robbed off Google to put this together. The hands on the woman are really shoddy but they're probably going to be hidden behind the window frame so it hopefully shouldn't matter too much. I may go back and tweak them a bit — they're really bothering me!

I'm not totally done with this yet — still got a fair bit of tweaking to do, mainly on the woman. The hair and coat are bothering me and she just feels incomplete somehow. I'm not sure about the colours either.

I think it's the face as well — it's had virtually no editing to it. I think it's because the man is so ridiculously stereotypical whereas she's fairly ordinary, so it looks a little out of place. Maybe I'll darken her hair, give her ridiculously pale skin and bright red lips and a huge pair of sunglasses. For some reason French women are harder to caricature!

(What is it with me and French people?!...)

Vector ferris wheel

I found this one on Google, but again it was really low quality. I blew it up by about 200% (look at the lovely JPEG artifacts!) and started to trace over it — this gives me the benefit of separating each part into layers for me to animate!

It's really quick and pretty shoddy but I figured since it's going to be in the distance, much like the cows, it shouldn't matter too much. It was a really simple pen tool job to which I simply applied stroke paths of varying thicknesses. The wheel itself is on the bottom layer, the carts are on another layer and the weird girder thing is on the top layer. This will allow me to parent the carts to the wheel and mimic the rotation as it spins.

I didn't notice at first but I think the image of the ferris wheel that I used is actually a stock image — whoops. I honestly wasn't aware — I nabbed it off another website which had taken the thumbnail from a stock image resource. Serves me right for not checking my sources!

I'm a bit concerned now and I probably shouldn't use it in my final film, however seeing as I've gone to the trouble of resampling the image I think it'll be alright to use it just for this one test? I'll probably just have to re-do it from scratch for use in the final animation.

WIP "Holland" scene V1

(Sorry for the awful quality. Blogger's video upload was being temperamental and I had to resort to Photobucket!)

Got the second cow in there now and even managed to get the windmill going! The picture I took was of relatively high resolution and the contrast between the sky and the body of the mill itself was great enough to make the selection process really easy. To get the sails to rotate I simply cut them out of the original image and pasted them onto a new layer. 

This obviously left a huge gap in the body of the windmill which I did a quick (and pretty shoddy) repair job on — but again, much like the cows, it's far off into the distance so I don't think it's too noticeable…!

To fill the gaps I simply made a feathered selection of the rough shape of the top of the windmill. I moved this selection and copied a large chunk of the body, which has a very similar texture/pattern.

It's far from an exact match and there's part of a window floating in the top left corner, but fortunately the position of the sails will mostly cover up the inconsistencies.

To repair the rest of the body I used a small clone stamp to brush in the missing sections.

It looks terrible, but once you put the sails on...

... It doesn't look too bad. Certainly adequate for my needs!

I think things are looking okay so far in terms of composition. I still need to find an office chair that matches the angle of the desk and my shoddy rotoscoping job on the cows is still really bothering me (especially on the tail), but aside from that I think that this will certainly be useable in my final film.

Lawrence gave me some great advice on using additional cameras and After Effects' 3D layer controls to create a false depth of field which massively improved the look of the scene. Already I'm seeing potential for this idea in the final film — I could blur the scene behind the window frame very slightly before shifting the focus to the field outside, just before everything pops on-screen.

First attempt with the Roto Brush tool

As mentioned previously, I spent some time today trying to get to grips with the Roto Brush tool with varied results. Mostly bad.

From what I understand of the Roto Brush tool so far, it works very similarly to the quick selection tool in Photoshop, by applying what is effectively an additive mask to the area that you paint over. It uses a fairly intuitive edge detection system that allows you to paint very vaguely around your object and still get a relatively accurate selection. Once you've got the selection around your object you can then go in with a smaller brush and further refine the edges to get as accurate a selection as possible.

By holding Alt the cursor changes and the lines you paint become red. This is a subtractive brush and basically tells After Effects which parts of the background to ignore.

You're basically "training" After Effects to learn parts of each frame to keep, and what to exclude. Once you've created your starting point, After Effects uses the information to track the object you've selected as it moves in each frame.

My first attempt at using the roto brush tool was fairly disastrous. In theory I should have been able to create my selection and then scrub through, frame by frame, and make minor alterations to my selection. For some reason it just didn't work — when I painted over a layer, absolutely nothing was happening. The selection stayed exactly the same. None of the video tutorials I read gave me any indication as to what I was doing wrong, nor could I find anybody else online with a similar problem.

I can only assume that the problem was with the way I was brushing my selection initially. From what I can gather I may have been giving After Effects too much information on my selection — I was probably using too many brush strokes to define my edges (the trick is to get as accurate a selection in as few strokes as possible). I was probably too specific with the additive and subtractive brushes, leading to conflicting information until eventually there was nothing left to work with. You can see above the selection shrinks and jumps about until eventually all I'm left with is a couple of black splotches, because that was the only part of the image that I hadn't brushed.

Still, failed experiments are still valid! I'm going to go back and look at some more tutorials on the tool to see if I can better get to grips with it.