Justine is doing a series where she answers user submitted questions. Check out the first episode. I finally got a chance to put together a little video.
I got a couple of “creepy” comments. Ha. Am I creepy?
With the release of Adobe’s CS4 I was able to download another free trial of After Effects. I first used AE more than a year ago in Resurrection (where I bring Justine back from the dead). I’ve never considered any Adobe software intuitive, and it took me 4 hours to figure out how to mask & blur the license plate on the car (that you see for all of 3 seconds). After a year of working with flash and delving deeper into photoshop, AE finally clicks. It turns out Flash & AE have a lot of similarities. Trials are 30 days long, so I’m trying to learn as much effecting as I can in the next few weeks. Rendering takes a while on my poor little lappy, though.
While I was editing the Ask IJ video I had one of those “woah this is amazing moments”. When I was young, I watched Mary Poppins easily 100 times.
In the above scene Bert dances with animated penguins. I have no concept of how accomplished that effect at the time. Were they literally slicing images together with the cells frame by frame? Possibly. It is truly stunning to think how far we’ve come. I have the tools to do the same thing more efficiently on my laptop, and the software was free (for 30 days). Go technology.
That looks to me like it was done with chromakey (ie, blue/green screen). Film the dance with Bert against a screen, animate the penguins to fit. This would imply some frame-by-frame work, but this does allow some simplification (ie, once you know how to position things on some keyframes, you then animate between them (animate, of course, being hand-animate))
Rotoscoping (frame-by-frame) is still the way to get the best lightsabers though
Wow, kinda creepy.
I think part of the reason it came across as creepy is because you didn’t blink (enough). Compare your blinks with Justine’s for example.
@Barak interesting. I don’t know all that much about classic animation techniques, though that makes sense. I believe you about the light saber animation, but that would take forever if you had an epic battle.
@Clintus haha. Thanks!
@Alfonso huh, I never thought about that. Maybe my eyes are just always moist?
Definitely using this for an upcoming episode
<3