Making “Figure/Ground” Part 3:
Beginning Again.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
I’ve started over after several weeks of work in a direction that didn’t pan out. This time I begin with the second sequence of the movie, entitled “September 21”!
There’s an emergency room scene in this sequence. I begin the tedious task of masking and altering the figures in every frame. In the image at the top, all three of these actors are actually doctors, by the way. They are college professors and PhD’s, rather than medical doctors. I have a very over educated cast! There’s humor in the scene, hence the “over-the-top” expressions.
I have to create a humorous but gross animation of a growth on dad’s ankle. I create a still image in Photoshop and animate it in After Effects so it pulses. Ew.
This blog entry is part of an ongoing series documenting the creation of my short film, “Figure/Ground”, about the death of my father, starring veteran actor Allan Kulakow. The finished film is a hybrid of photographic and painted imagery, created using Photoshop, After Effects and Final Cut Pro. The film uses many of the techniques discussed in my book “Digital Art Revolution”.
I’ll document my techniques, approaches, decision process and frustrations in hopes that they’ll be of interest to digital artists and filmmakers.
There’s an outside scene. The background is mostly trees and pavement. Grays and greens. Rather that mask off every frame and replace the background with the yellow-green background, I simply desaturate the green and then use Photoshop’s Color Replacement Brush to paint over any “colorful” details with a green color. This saves me days of work, it’s appropriate for the scene, and it adds a little variety to my visual themes.
For some reason, I love the simplicity of this frame, pumping gas. Laura, my wife, says “oh brother!”
I’m posting these entries once a week, by the way, but they are not in real time. Most sequences took WAY more than a week to create. Next week, onward to our next sequence!
Links to other entries about the making of Figure/Ground:
Digital Art Revolution Blog