Stop Motion Tests

Initally I started my stop motion tests using a white background for my hand. I thought that the contrast of the white with my hand would allow for an easy background cutout. This was a boring lesson to learn, and I came close to getting the desired effect using colour range difference on After Effects. Ultimately, I couldn’t achieve a compromise between loosing the shadows underneath my hand and keeping the highlights. This mean’t white part of my hand began losing transparency and showing the background beneath.

So I headed back to the animation studio and did it all again. Unfortunately not all the lights on the set up I was using were working, you win some you lose some. But I did have a green screen! The effect is wonderfully spooky. I used different running styles and mixed them up to make the unnatural hand look a bit more natural. With a few colour shifts, the hand felt fairly at home amonst the hedgerow.

With my new found freedom of not doing an overly complicated illustrated animation I began experimenting with some moving type. I was happy with the result and it paired well with the morphing hand. Using various warp effects I managed to get a fairly seamless transition between the hand and the twig. If you look carefully you can see when the twig appears in its wiggly form. It was just a case of trying to match the height of the waves between each scene.