A Technical Description of the Workflow and Tools Used During the Chroma Key Trouble With Unicorns Introduction Shoot

The Pixilation Shoot
On Saturday 2006-11-04, the first shoot of the Trouble With Unicorns took place. This was for the opening sequence of the project, which is in a 2D-animation visual style. Instead of characters made of cutout paper or other materials, (which might be seen as the traditional 2D animation style), this sequence is going to have live people animated in a stop-motion animation technique called pixilation. This will give the characters the surface appearance of being real, but since they are ‘pixilated,’ their motions will be interrupted and jagged, giving them an animated aesthetic. The characters were captured performing their motions in front of a chroma screen, so that they can be “cut out” and composited in with backgrounds at a later point in the post-production process.

Technical Considerations of Chroma Key Shooting
Here is a still of our makeshift chroma keying setup.

(more…)

No Comments

Here is a short entry for a change. I just did another test key of Lumbar Laura dancing. I was worried about how well her hair would key, because even though I wetted it down with water to reduce the amount of stray hairs flying about, it was still not a solid object. Fortunately, it worked very well. Keylight is amazing! I tried the trick with the blurring chroma information with an adjustment layer, and it does help a little bit, but there is actually a parameter of Keylight which accomplishes the same thing.

Also present in the following video is a very rough composite of some of that gross mud with worms crawling around in it warped with a cheesy liquify effect (I would do this better if this were a serious composite), and some TV static generated with the Bad TV plugin from the excellent Tinderbox plugin collection. This just a very short clip, so don’t spend too much time waching it…
(more…)

No Comments

Tonight I performed an experiment with chroma keying the circuit board footage as a test to see how much of an arduous process I am in for over the rest of my post production. This is a still from my footage:

As you can see, the chroma screens are underexposed, as are the subjects, and as a result the image is somewhat noisy, which doesn’t help matters with the already artifacted DV source. Also, there are lighting inconsistencies in the chroma screen. Also, like an idiot, I decided it would be a good idea to backlight the subjects with a blue-gel; I thought this would make my planned key more believable. I thought that because the blue light was from a source other than spill from the bluescreen, it would be okay. It’s not okay. Blue is blue! That must be kept in mind in the future.
(more…)

1 Comment

During Tue 04-04 and Wed. 04-05, I performed animation. On my media request form, I only put down 8 hours per week, not quite realizing just how little time this was. Running full-force into the brunt of time-shortage, I adopted the following strategy: work at night. I reserved two 4 hour blocks of time from 10p-2a on each day, and then worked for 7-9 hours. The later morning hours are not often spent conscious these days. Just yesterday, I got the very kind Stephanie Zorn to increase my time to 16 hours for the first two weeks, which will result in slightly less horrendous pressure.

The process of animation is going well, and with experience, I get better at making good lighting, and better at making good motion (at least it seems like I’m getting better). In approximately 24 hours of solid animating, I have shot ~1725 frames, not including the tests done in my home lab (which I may still use for some things), which comes out to about 2 minutes and 24 seconds. There is a long way to go, but at least progress is being made.

Following are some production stills, for your consideration. The purpose of these photos is for you all to get a visual sense for what is going on, as well as some of the problems I have faced, and solutions I have eximated. Therefore, apologies for the briefness of the text.
(more…)

3 Comments