...When A Plan Comes Together

Post-production was a relatively long but relatively easy process. The first major hurdle was using After Effects to create the shadows. Without some kind of lighting effects I'd never used masks in the program before, and like the animation itself, given that I'm a total newcomer to the process when taken to this level of completion, it came out surprisingly well.

However, I didn't come to the conclusion that I needed to use After Effects right away. Originally, I planned to use Premiere to create the shadow in the first shot, by overlaying another copy of the animation, but with the brightness and contrast turned down so low that it was a black outline, and then adding a blur filter so that the edges were visible but the center is dark. As you can see in this early workprint made after I'd shot the live-action and was placing the takes into the timeline to replace the animatic, it looks passable, but is not that good.



Consolidation Early Workprint from Ashley Watts on Vimeo. password - consolidation1

So, I went into After Effects to see what I could do. After following online guides and some practice, I had a good mask with the right outline to it. After adding the same brightness/contrast filter, I came to effect present in the finished film.

One difference visible from the above workprint and the mask image is the hand. After showing the workprint to Corrie, he said that having the arms by her side throughout the first shot felt unnatural, and suggested the hand movement seen in the finished film. This caused the problem with the hands that I mentioned at the start of the last post.

I'm not very good with drawing hands anyway, and this deficiency came into play here. Below you can see a slow progression of trying to figure out some way to make a believable clenched hand, before just settling with the one seen in the finished product. I wasn't very happy with it when I originally created the hand, but seeing it in situ made me warm to it a bit.

... and that's just the ones I screenshotted, there were many, many other iterations I went through to get to that stage that I didn't document because I was too busy just figuring out how in the hell I was going to make it work.

After that, I had audio sync issues when putting into Premiere. Matching the video to where it was supposed to be caused audio mismatching, and syncing the audio resulted in losing the first frame of each clip. I tested both, putting it straight in vs putting it one frame back, but 1 frame back won out in the end after export tests showed the latter got a better result.

The only other post-production aspect to talk about was the motion tracking. Using the anchor point tool in After Effects, I got a passable match, but frankly I think perfect results with footage that wobbly (due to the book not moving 100% smoothly) isn't possible manually, and I'd have to look into automatic tracking solutions to achieve a better result.

With that, editing was done, and other than tweaks after the group presentation to add shadows to the second and third shots, improving the first shot's lip sync and importing the After Effects projects directly rather than exporting them to another video that I imported into Premiere (thus revealing the colour corrected shot I accidentally covered up the first time around by having non-corrected footage in the background of the After Effects project), I was done.