#cream screen

[thetimetravellingconundrum-blog]

Yesterday I had a brilliant idea to test out keying out colour in After Effects, kinda like green screening...except it wasn't green, it was cream. I think the video speaks for itself and the fact that, test wise it was an unmitigated disaster. However, having come out of this on the other side I can say that I've learnt something new about green screening and technology. Yay! +1 skills for me :)

Cream screening aside this was perhaps the first chance that I've had to really animate my character. I think I need to get used to moving a character around on a flat plane but other than that it was actually alright. I just need to keep a few things in mind, like making sure the body is registered so it doesn't move all over the place and arm movements. While I was animating today the limbs kept coming off so I'll have to fasten the hip and shoulder joints together so that I don't have the added nuisance of trying to keep limbs attached. How annoying.

[thetimetravellingconundrum-blog]

a quick test

Today I finally got back into the work mode. Nothing majorly impressive, just a quick test to put the green screen test to work. Except the screen wasn't green, it was cream. I wanted to see how easy it would be to key out the background colour and composit. A rough test isn't that hard to do as 'Stacie showed me that keying out colours in After Effects is astonishingly easy, however the unfortunate thing of this whole scenario is that since I used cream as my screen colour it was hard for me to key out some of the colour without keying out the entire colour as well. To remedy this, I bought blue card to use as my screen...only to realise that the girl's dress has blue in it as well. Oh dear. I'll give it a go anyway. Might as well carry through the test to completion yes? If that doesn't work I'll try it Eva's way using the Lasso tool in Photoshop.

The set-up I was using today wasn't that bad either, as I was using a compact camera with the rostrum to get a better quality image. Stan then pointed out that when I come around to filming I'll want to work in A5...which is back in Caerleon. While this would be fabulous for my work ethic this means that I'll have to get my ass in gear for filming and try and wrangle my way onto the stop motion schedule. If that fails I might just have to hog the linetester room in the new campus FOREVER and film at my own pace. It's all fine to be thinking theoretically and working in pre-production but now is time for the pedals to touch the floor. And to put things mildly, I am terrified.

Oh by the way, for those of you observant enough to notice that this is just text and not a video of testing with some text, the internet has a secret vendetta against me. As soon as I manage to get the test onto youtube it will be embedded onto this blog.