#motion test monday

[newfangledstudios]

Using After Effects’ Autotrace to Create a Hand Drawn Animated Look from Footage

A #motiontestmonday by Fred Kennedy

The auto trace feature in After Effects can be used to trace either a single frame or a sequence of frames.

In this motion test, I’ve used auto trace to process a number of stock footage elements we had lying around here at Newfangled. The awesome thing about auto trace is the fact that it creates animated masks based on the footage. These masks play very well with a number of effects inside AE. In these examples I have mainly used combinations of the scribble effect and Trapcode’s 3d Stroke to stylize the traced masks. Although it’s not a fully procedural effect, it’s a super quick way to create hand drawn looking animations with organic movement and lots of detail. Just make sure you plan those shots well to avoid doing work over and over again.

To finish the style, I applied the “posterize time” effect to all of my layers with varying frame rate reductions (to vary the layers for a bit more complexity). For more information on working with Fred or how we can help you with your next project, contact our Executive Producer Jenna Vandermost.

[newfangledstudios]

For the motion test monday this week, Cory was experimenting with emulating different styles of popular animation.

[old-ignore]

Recreating slow motion & water in After Effects #motiontestmonday  How-to by Fred Kennedy

Original Footage Slowed down from 60fps to super slow motion using the built in time warp effect in AE.

Found a clip of some dude splashing water balloons on himself over a black backdrop in slow motion (the things I do….)

Keyed out the slow motion water and slowed it down even more using time warp to create a number of different splash elements.

Composited those on top of the slow motion wet dog footage and puppet tooled them to look as though they had a bit of motion to them (as if the water was slipping off the dogs fur as it whipped back and fourth.) Added some blurred out in the background as well as some smaller crisp ones where they worked a bit better.

Created an overlay that looked like water had hit the camera lens. I used some slow motion water footage of a splash of water to create a displacement map that warped the scene a bit (as a water drop's refraction would do.)

Add lens flare/slight camera move to give it a bit more life and hide some of the fact that this dog is actually not that wet. Slap on some summer music on top, and go home.