Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping from John Brown on Vimeo.

Todays workshop was based around rotoscoping, a motion graphic style that involves cropping videos. We has no prep to do for the workshop as the footage we filmed that is the origin of this piece of work got shot in the studio on the day it was produced. Once we had filmed our short motion clip we imported it straight into after effects to begin editing it directly.

The first thing you need to do is change the frame rate in the video settings to 25fps this allows the video to be the same speed as the composition that we will create next. Once the frame rate is correct then you need to clip the video so that it is only 1 second long as we will loop the video a bit like the boomerang setting on instagram. 

Once you have the 1 second video you need to zoom in on the time line so that you can see each one of the 25 frames. Using the pen tool you have to trace around the object that you want to keep inside the frame. then on the timeline one move frame alone and do this for each of the 25 frames so they have a clipping masked on the below layer. If you change the layer style of the video clip you will block out the background of the footage and just keep the moving figure that we filmed in the beginning.

To add more style to the video I added an animal print background as the video clip is quite cheeky and sassy. I also duplicated and scaled the original clip to fill some of the background space.