In our design time and animation lessons, we are producing our own rotoscope animations. What I did with mine was rather than recording my own videos, I downloaded a video of YouTube. Japanese Sword Testing. Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-meKUuISfqQ
From there I went onto photoshop then drag and dropped a video onto photoshop then added a timeline window. After that was done I selected a clip of the video to start drawing lines in order to imitate the actions through the lines to produce a rotoscope. Once I drew my set of lines from the person from the video. I had to repeat the seqeunce endlessly (exaggeration by the way) by doing copying and pasting it after one frame to another frame. Although we noticed a mistake, as I copy and pasting the lines, it made the rotoscope incosistent. What I had to was keep drawings the lines of the character and object for rotoscoping. In the process of producing my rotoscoping, what I did wrong for the first 12 frames was that I was drawing in the actual video layer, rather than the layer overlapping it itself. You could still see it although preferably, it should've been on another layer. After a weeks worth of rotoscoping, I got 3 seconds worth of frames. Now the video itself is running at 30 FPS although Luca mentioned he would slow down the animation down to 24 frames per second. Meaning I've created 72 frames so far on 15/03/19. What I've done is previewed my frames and took the faces from frames 0-56. I didn't like the face part of it personally so I decided to go with a silhouette. Why I did this because the face was so ugly that the consistency was very noticeable.
Once that was out of the way, me and Luca had an idea for the rotoscope. The wave and motion of the swords. When fight choreography occurs, sometimes you'll notice that motion or waves occurs within a sword or an axe.
On 18/03/19, I had produced about 72 frames. I started to give my sword motion some waves and personality. Fabiola asked us to write down on the sticky notes for achievements. Here's what I wrote for the main goals of the morning lesson: 1. Produce motion from the sword. 2. Produce 10 frames at a minimum. Under an hour, I managed to do all that easily. In one lesson, I managed to produced an approximinate 22 frames.
On 20/03/19, I reached over 100+ frames in total. I am very proud of myself to get this far honestly. I didn't do too much with the rotoscoping that day as I was in the middle of model UV-ing and texturing. Then on the 22/03/2019, I made it to 120 frames. Meaning that I produced 5 seconds worth of frames. Even though the video is running at 30 fps but will be toned down to 24 fps.
On the last week of Feb-March term I did some finishing touches for the rotoscoping. I wanted to fill some colour on the figure for the rotoscope. Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to do so by every frame. Because of this the result on the blue colouring on the figure is messy and inconsistent after the frames. Now, I uploaded my piece onto Weblearn. I was going to import the video into a MP4 video format however I ended up forgetting to do so.
When I returned from spring term break I reviewed over my Rotoscope and decided to add (what I like to call it) definitive final touches and adjustments. So I was using the paint bucket tool (which was in blue color) to fill in the heads and hands. There were times however were the paint bucket leaked onto either the body or the background. All I had to do was produce the white lines to close the gaps to prevent leaking. For the record, I had produced 150 frames. At this phase, all I need to do was to discuss with Fabiola, import my file into MOV and from there uploaded the video before the last time. Why I say before the last time is because I decided to check to see if there any tweaks and changes I wanted to make for the video and if my memory serves me right, I did this during my wednesday catch up sessions (which I've been atteneding for most weeks and every other week) and then uploaded the video again after the tweaks were adapted. With all of that out of the way here's my rotoscope video:
Overall, I am proud of my rotoscope. I think if I had more time to do it. I would've added a couple more seconds worth and applied some more special effects to it. I've done tracing in the past before so I knew what I was doing to some extent when it came to rotoscoping. Although I feel like my edges and neatness could be improved upon. Why I say this is because I tend to have twitchy hands and that for me is quite the obstacle of a challenege to go over. Anyhow, I learned how to rotoscope via photoshop. It was a fun yet long process.
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