Wipster GIF competition

I learned about Wipster's GIF competition in a School of Motion email and thought it sounded like fun and a good chance to stretch some skills I don't get to use often. Congratulations to winners Nata Metlukh, Sam Burton, Minh Nguyen and Anthony Dillon!

Gear:

• Sony a6300

• Zhiyun 2

• Wacom Bamboo Fun CTE-450

• Adobe CC

Film

Once I landed on a concept, we got film of me hitting the bags. As I started drawing over the footage in Photoshop, I realized the concept and story wasn't coming through. So I took a step back into Bridge, scrubbed through some other clips, and found a great looping point in one of the "shots for safety."

Rotoscope — Photoshop

The bulk of the work was done in Photoshop with a Bamboo CTE-450 tablet. I decided to embrace a dirty, sketchy style to be able to work faster. Base layers were created for the uniform, belt, gloves, skin, hair, foreground bag, floor and the other bags. After those were completed, I started drawing in some smear effects. I played with drawing those lines by holding the pen loosely near the eraser. On paper, it creates a neat line form that looks similar to crackling electricity. The technique transferred nicely to the digital canvas, so I went with it and the smears slowly turned more into lightning.

Most of the layers have their own hue/saturation adjustment layer to tweak color. That was originally to separate colors pulled from the video, but many of the adjusted colors were still used in the final.

Stylize — After Effects

I'd intended from the beginning to do some processing to the completed cel animation and wanted to finish early to give myself time for experimentation. I originally had in mind a mixed media approach by combining cutouts of the video frames and adding some blurring to the smear effects. But since the smears became more electric and defined, I reached for the Glow effect and discovered the neon sign thing that people have been doing for years. The rest was tweaking colors, embracing the neon, and not worrying that it's a style that's "been done."

Learnings

I worked through a few different concepts and exercised judgement around when they weren’t right for the project, considering time constraints. It’s important to be able to know when to push a concept and when to walk away from one.

This one’s a little silly, but I’d forgotten how much hand strength it takes to sketch for any period of time. Working for a few hours in the evenings before bed was just about as much as my drawing hand could handle anyway.

I shot in 60 fps just in case the footage needed to be slowed down or if something neat could have come from that. Going from 60 fps to 12 fps for rotoscoping lost a lot of frames, but what I hadn’t anticipated was that some of the impact frames were lost. This causes some of the hits to not “feel” as hard or intense as I think they could have been. I’ll remember that going forward. It made me wonder about the legend in which Bruce Lee and Kareem Abdul Jabbar had to slow down their movements for filming. I wonder if the technical limitations of the time couldn’t catch the impact frames that add weight to the strikes.