Thursday, December 20, 2007

Rotoscoping


We have over 6300 frames of lightsaber rotoscoping to complete. The process is arduous but rewarding. We are following the tutorial by Ryan Wieber. It creates the most realistic movie quality saber effects. After Effects is used in this process. After the footage is imported (each frame is a targa file), a mask must be placed over each saber in each frame. A seven second sequence is 210 frames. This takes a long time to complete. The background saber must be roto'd first followed by the foreground saber. The image shows you how the sabers will appear in the film release. This scene was filmed 360 feet underground in the MINOS detector hall at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

On a side note, our latest padawan Alexandra Crawford was born on December 4th.