Go Mickey, go!

My final elective for Professional Toolkit is VFX in which I return to my old friend After Effects - this is still a touchy subject. 

In our first lesson we took to rotoscoping, something I had personally never done before. A lot easier than it looks but rather laborious if you pick tricky footage, something I may have done accidentally. I chose a piece of animation of Mickey mouse riding a bathtub/bike hybrid, why? Because I could. It was then a case of scoping out what I wanted, playing a few frames forwards and then when the tool went of track, backing up and setting it straight. Something that with footage filmed for this purpose wouldn't happen as often as it did for me. 

My first run through, getting a chunk of him out of the way before going into detail.

After going through frame by frame I managed to get something I was proud of that included a bit of the water splash that was appearing behind him. I then went on to try and motion track him so I could add the co-ordinates to the image behind him and make him look like he was riding through the river. However due to the fact that it was an animation this proved difficult because the track point would be there for a few frames and then vanish, so that idea quickly went away.

I then decided to make the best of it and move, by hand, the background and keyframe it to give it some motion - I also added a displacement filter onto it to make it look less 'perfect'.

Add a bit of colour correct (or anything to make the two pieces look like they belong on the same image) and I exported.

It wasn't until I saw the piece on a different monitor that I saw all the problems at the end that were probably a result of me sitting there for hours staring at it and hoping it was fixed, to the point it became true.

But I really like this technique and I can see myself using it in the future, more specifically in my my fields and frames project.