A Tale In The Sting: 2D Rotoscope Animation

Adding light to creatures

With the stop motion finished, the finesse is the overlay of the aesthetic, the one I'm going for. A meticulously tedious process of independently drawing over every frame, I believe that it was time well spent for the full-blown execution of my animation and the eye-candy (for a lack of better words) I want it to be - smooth in movement, enriched in contrast, prominent in peculiar colors and conventions. Through this step, I focused on three aspects of polishing up the animation - the glow of the creatures, erasing the unnecessary background elements of my room, and adding the faces to Vladimir and Estragon. With no frame being left as it initially was, I went on doing all of these assets in a total of 5 days of consecutive work, beginning with the creatures. As I mentioned previously that I changed course in that I decided to make them glow instead of radiate a dark aura, I used Photoshop CC's Vivid Light brush with a certain level of opacity and flow (all shown in the pictures) to quickly go over their form in every single frame. With the inconsistency between the frames and the fast fps, the creatures seem to adapt the factors of appearing like ghosts with a really rapid radiance. The second stop was the in and out scenes where I color burned the background to perfectly arrange the juxtaposition between the visible and the invisible. Yes, I initially wanted to use a mask, however, every consecutive frame has the camera dropped a little to the side as I did not take one still for the introductory and concluding scenes but instead I set the camera to take about 100 pictures for both scenes, gradually adjusting in shot due to the camera's not-so-static positioning. All in all, something accidental, but effective in that it does not seem to be motionless - it goes with the flow of the animation. With this noise, I had to redraw the Color Burn for every frame, making it appear like it is a dark fog surrounding the environment due to the 0% hardness of the brush. And finally, the faces of the characters which are as simple as they can get, yet complex enough to convey the emotions both Vladimir and Estragon portray in the beginning of the play. Just goes to show ya, experimentation adds that whimsicality to animations, although that is something rarely implemented in the industry. However, I still stuck to the orders given for the title sequence, and the next step is finalizing the fading in and out titles to make it fit as a title sequence.