Making “Figure/Ground” Part 5:
Digital Art Improvisation!
Sunday, December 6, 2009
This week’s post discusses my work on a sequence entitled “October 1”, which deals with our families other activities while dad is in the hospital.
I had to create a fake blackboard from scratch and animate a “chalky” drawing to match existing movements from my hand. I had to graph out points at various times based on my random hand gestures and also make it create a drawing that makes sense. Additionally, I was actually holding a pen and had to replace it in each frame with a fake piece of chalk I created in various perspectives. A lot of work!
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.
A great deal of this sequence features scenes of my family surreptitiously cleaning his house while dad’s in the hospital. They’re nice images but they were filmed in low lighting conditions and are too grainy and unclear to create the crisp edges necessary to create the green background and colorful foreground used in the rest of the sequences. I have to improvise and create something that is possible but will still be visually related. I decide to render the whole scene in the green tones with just a bit of color peeking through. This works well.
Links to other entries about the making of Figure/Ground:
Digital Art Revolution Blog