Today we used a video clip of our choice to rotoscope using After Effects. I found a video on my friend of my cat bathing himself and thought I'd see what I could do with that.
At first we went into the After Effects drop down and selected Preferences then General to ensure that where is says "Preserve Constant Vortex and Feather Point Count when Editing Masks" was turned off.
I then went on to creating a mask around the cat using the pen tool. Once I had done it the once, I could go along frame by frame editing the mask to make sure it fit round the cat in every frame, separating it from the background of the video.
Once I had enough Keyframes, I selected them all and while holding down the CTRL key, clicked on one of them. then selected "Toggle Hold Keyframe"
The next stage of my rotoscope was to create a background. I created a new composition and added the rotoscope of my cat into the timeline, then went to Layer, New and "Solid" and chose the colour for my background. I made sure to select "Make Comp Size" when doing this.
When creating the shadow for my cat, I went through the same process of adding a solid colour then made sure it was underneath the cat layer in my timeline to replicate the shape of my cat then i just aligned it slightly to the left or the right to create a "shadow" effect.
I really enjoyed today's After Effects tutorial on Rotoscoping and I'm very pleased with my final outcome!
