Test Animations - Preparation

Over the past couple weeks I've been working on a test animation to see how I can manipulate footage in a way that looks realistic and will blend in to the live action footage a bit more. Since the main movement in these shots is the animation itself, I'm animating over still images, and then finding out how to make this as dynamic as possible. This post will just show the prep that I did for each shots before moving on to the actual animations.

1. Colorgrade

 I had been waiting to film on a sunny day for ages, and it just was not happening, so instead I filmed on a quite cloudy day. This was actually okay since the colors turned out quite flat and meant I could manipulate them to basically any direction I wanted. The first thing I did was bump the warmth almost all the way up, to bring back that sunnier atmosphere. I then put the saturation up slightly, probably more than most graders would, with the goal of this video to look natural but slightly uncanny. I also added a white vignette to add to the airy, uncanny vibe. I attempted to make  the colors in the plants and painting look unnatural while the surroundings are more dull. I also had the original adjustment layer as the first pass and then cut it up and made slight adjustments based on what each shot needed.

I'm aware that once the actual animations are done I will have to colorgrade again to make sure everything is blended.

2. Photoshop

I decided to have some of my shots be manipulated straight on adobe animate and others using photoshop. For the shot of the satin pathos, I used the spot healing tool to erase the dots, not at 100% hardness so that it would blend well - combined with clone stamp tool. My goal was to be able to draw the dots back on in animate, and have them fall away seamlessly. I'm quite happy with how this turned out and think it will make a good base.

For the nest shot, I put the areas I wanted to manipulate on separate layers, so that when putting this back into adobe animate this layer will be the only thing that is changed while the original shot stayed the same. I used the smudge tool until I got the desired effect. This shot is so far one of the most cartoon-y ones in this video, but seeing how this technique could possibly be used later on, maybe for bigger images with more movement could be a technique that I'd like to explore in my 5 min excerpt or final film.