Photoshop: Rotoscoping (Moving with a Feeling)

After learning about rotoscoping; we were tasked with creating our own piece, which would be called 'Moving with a Feeling'.  For my piece I wanted to use a video of my cat, because I remembered I had this video of my cat (Willow) which was funny but a bit blurry. This made it challenging to trace but some of the frames turned out very funny.

The original video was square, since I had uploaded it to Instagram. I kept the ratio the same so that I could also upload the final video and also because it would be quite simple to crop the video down to the right ratio.

Wip1(Basic outlines)

The first things I did , were setting up the document and then tracing the outline of the video. After doing this I realised the video wasn't very stable, so therefore I manually went through and moved the layers I had traced (Using the rectangle select tool and the move tool) since I didn't really want to re draw all of the frames (and I would have had to move them anyway if I had found a way to make the original video a bit less shaky). I made sure the frames were lined up more by drawing a horizontal diagonal line which was like an average for where the table was in the video. 

Wip2 (Lined up the frames)

After doing this, it sort of looked like the table was moving (Horizontally) because of the brush I used. Therefore I went through a bit of trial and error, by trying to use a normal layer (which didn't line up with all the frames and therfore failed) and using a round brush instead for the table on the video layer (which ended up being what I went with for the final result). 

I also added in the string to the video at this point so that it would line up with the table. This was a bit challenging because I did this after moving all the frames, to help with this a bit I tried using onion layers and also keyframed the original video so that it lined up with the moved frames. 

Wip3(adding the string and changing the table again)

After this, I started colouring Willow in. I first did the first frame so I had an idea of what I wanted all the frames to look like and then I went through and coloured all the frames (on seperate layers so it would be easy to adjust them later on, if need be).

Wip4 (Base colours)

 I think the video started to look quite good at this stage, except from the small errors (Like where I overlapped the translucent brown) and also the background and table looked a bit boring. (In hindsight, I didn't really do too much to fix this problem and also to be honest I don't think I picked the best colours for these [ The orange-brown was colour grabbed from the original video and the green was chosen because I thought I would go well with Willow's eyes (Because they are green)])

After this I added Willows stripes and shaded the background a bit. I think the majority of the stripe frames turned out good, however where Willow moves quite quickly it looked quite unusual for his stripes to stand out so much, so I ended up adding a gaussian blur to the frames towards the end. This didn't really fix the issue properly since it just made the stripes blurry. For the shading I just did some smudging with a darker shade of the colours.

Wip5(Stripes)

Finally, I added an outline of black around Willows eyes to make them stand out a bit more? and I added the text with his name 'Willow'. I made two variations of the video with the text, one where it is in the background and one where it gets hit off the screen when Willow gets close to it to make it seem as though he interacts with it. I prefered this second version so I went with it, I also made the text fade in. Also, for the final version I fixed the aspect ratio to 9:6. 

Final Version

After completing this version (Even though I forgot the whiskers), I then made a more abstract version. I was inspired a bit by a rotoscoping of a flamingo, where they used lots of different colours and patterns. 

Alternate verison

This version was a bit easier to make, the only real challenges were coming up with the different patterns and also I wanted to change the 'Willow' text to white but it kept reverting to the brown colour I had used originally (I didn't manage to fix this sadly). One thing I really like about this style is that you can do very random things for each layer but together it still looks like the video and because the frames move quite quickly you don't really notice all of the different patterns.

Overall, It was really fun to be able to animate this video since it is one of my favourites. I also think I now understand how to rotoscope and how I can use it in different ways in my work.