Planning - Animation Test

 

Here is a small animation test I conducted to see if I could create the effect I was originally aiming for.

How I made, and intend to make the animation in my music video is as follows:

1. Shoot the video I wish to create an animation over.
2. Run it through Adobe Premiere Pro with the Warp Stabilizer effect if necessary - I need the shots to be as still as possible for overlaying animation onto.
3. Import the video into FlipaClip, my main tool of animation, on my iPad. If there are more complex shots I intend to use Adobe Animate, which gives me lots of rotoscoping capabilities and other visual effects.
4. My animation is at 4/5 frames per second, so FlipaClip automatically cuts down the video to show five frames per second instead of 30. By importing the video into the programme I am able to draw on top of the video on the layer above to see exactly where my animation will be placed in relation to the video.
5. If my animation has elements that will be cropped, I do not erase them in the animation on FlipaClip. I use the entirety of the canvas and draw the whole character (for the most part) to keep things consistent and allow me to move the animation around slightly if need-be (trust me, it just saves time in the long run). In this case, I animated the bee even when it was behind the window so it looked smoother when it emerged.
6. Once the animation has been made I set the background to a bright green, or a bright colour that is not shared in any of the colouring (making a green screen)
7. Import it into Adobe Premiere and resize it so that it fits the screen. Apply the "Colour Key" effect from the effects panel and colour-drop the bright green so that the green-screen is applied. I often have to play around with the tolerance and feather tools to make it look clean and remove any green spots.
1. In this example, the bee goes behind the window, so I had to utilise masks to achieve this.
2. In the effects controls panel (where you are able to change the size, rotation etc. of the video selected) I created an opacity mask and adjusted the edges of the mask so that it fit the four edges of the window. Opacity masks allow only the calibrated shape of video to appear, so I made two masks for the two panes of the window that the bee is visible in.
3. I added a light drop shadow to make it look more authentic.
4. I then exported the video as a H.264.

An easy to understand tutorial on masking can be found here.