Contest

Hey Lovelies! I have been pretty busy lately, so I wasn’t able to make something crafty for you today. I was working on a dance animation for my favorite group, Team Spark a Chinese group. They announced a Dance Cover Contest about a month ago, and because of reasons, I can’t dance. I tried to think outside the box, as I usually do and decided to draw an animation of the dance. But never realized how much work that actually is. I thought I could do the whole MV before the deadline, turned out, I could only do half of it. xD. I’ll gonna explane how I made it and show you what my end result is in this blog. So, if you feel like doing it as well one day, you know how to do it!

Rotoscoping

First, I downloaded the Joker dance MV by Team Spark. I needed it for the technique I wanna use, called Rotoscoping. That basicly means you are gonna trace every frame of the movie/clip you wanna use. Usually this is done digitally, but there’s always going something wrong if I work digital, (I’ve some fun stories about me and electronics tho, but not now!) so better not for me. That’s why I chose to do it on paper, what’s actually more work, I’ll explane later.

Then I opened Photoshop and opened the ‘Animation’ option (You can find that under the tab window). Then I dragged and dropped the MV in there. I set the frame rate to 11FPS, normally it was 25.. gosh I can’t imagine if I had to draw 25 frames per second. I would have never finished even 30 seconds xD. I probably could have set the frame rate to 10, but yeah, not sure what I was thinking xD.

Tracing

Now everything was ready to go, I had to cut my paper from A4 to A6. I didn’t wanna use big sheets for this, just big enough to make it work. So yeah, that’s another extra step I had to take. I am used to cutting paper sheet and survived them all without getting injured haha!

From here I made sure that I positioned my paper at the same spot every time. This is very important to make it work at all. So I got the rulers out in photoshop and dragged some guides for the size of my paper, those lines need to stay there all the time, so I locked them. When that was done, it was time to start.

I taped my paper to my screen and made sure I could see though it, I made my room dark and my screen as light as possible. This way I could see the image through my paper and start tracing.

Make decisions

While tracing I was in control who I wanted to draw and who should dissapear etc. I had fun playing around with people coming in and out of screen. This way it was also faster to finish it. If I had drawn everyone on screen all the time, it would have taken me even more time. And this way you also could get a creative aspect in there.
I sometimes had to make up things as well, when it got covered by something or someone, but I guess it’s not noticeable in the video, yay!

No clue if it would work out

I wasn’t sure if it all was working out, I only could flip all pages in my hand to check a bit. But I would know for sure if I scanned/edited/animated everything together. Most of the time it was just praying it was going to work.

Scanning

After I had drawn all the frames I wanted (I wanted to go up to after the chorus, so around 1min 35sec). I realized how many papers I had to scan and edit. I had drawn 1035 individual images, my pile was huge. These all had to be scanned. I did it per 2 at the same time. To give my scanner a break as well. Those scans needed to be cutted out to the right, same size and saved as the right number of frame. I couldn’t mess up, if I did, my animation was ruined. This process took me a few days >_<.

Animating

I did this in photoshop, used the same thing as I used in the beginning, only a bit different. First is was a timeline animation, but now I was using frame animation. Every image got it’s own frame and I set the time that the frame was shown to 0,09sec. While the first frame of every sec was shown for 0,1sec.

This was pretty time consuming to do, but not as much as the other things I had to do before this. It went pretty smootly up till the moment I got to the end and photoshop refused to save my work. so I tried to render the video without it all being saved, and guess what. Photoshop crashed.
I had to redo about 300 frames, so not that much, but by that time I was pretty frustrated and running out of time. I actually wanted to have it up that day. That did not happen, it was already 9pm when photoshop crashed. I decided it was better to stop, calm down  and continue the next day.

Make the Video

So the next day I got the animating process done pretty fast, it went smoothly this time. But I knew I wasn’t done yet. I still had to add music and I wanted to film a small part where I show the pile of paper I used.

I switched to the program Magix to finish it all up. What I noticed was when I added my animation with the music, it didn’t line up. So I actually set the frame rate in my video to I believe 12,20FPS. Now it sorta lined up properly with the dance moves. I added my video of the pile of paper and some text and exported the whole thing. Now it was finally almost over. Just uploading on youtube and other social media and I got it all done before the deadline.

I’m pretty statified with hou my video turned out!even tho it took forever to finish, over 80 hours >_<. I’m happy everything worked out. Now the waiting game starts and I am not even sure if my entry gets accepted. Let’s find out. At least I’ve shown my boys some love! That’s what counts, right?! ^^

Now I need a massage (any volunteers?! xD) and plenty of time to relax/sleep xD

Love
Danielle