Australian film - Federation of Australian Movie Makers

light on the shoes would be necessary. Ken arrived and Oh, No….! His dancing shoes are black and white,
and his socks were red. Obviously the black part of the shoes would disappear in the video…So it was decided
to try with green screen – not my first option because of the problems with lighting the green evenly
and not casting shadows in the confined space.
So Ken danced, and danced and I videoed HDV tape. We changed the angle and I shot from the step ladder
trying to avoid those pesky shadows. So we had quite a fun night with me quite unaware of problems to
follow.
Even as we did the green screen shoot I knew the chances of a clean “key” were nil so my plan was to load
the video into TB Studio and rotoscope the outline of the shoes. Sounds simple. I soon found out the TB
Studio doesn’t like HDV and after a couple of queries on the Support Forum I reduced the quality to SD
and converted the video to an Image Sequence – each frame becomes an image. Oh yes, lots of them.
With the video images loaded as a background layer I tackled the task of tracing the outline of each shoe
on each frame on a new layer. I soon realised I needed another layer so that the left shoe and the right shoe
could be treated separately…double trouble.
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Not very nice, eh? and this was plan B …
A major problem soon became apparent – HDV at 25 frames a second is not enough to “stop” the motion
and considerable distortion to the shape of the shoes occurred. When I had enough shoes traced in TB and
“played” to check the motion -
It was horrible! I then had no option but to make new, better shaped drawings and refine the range of
movements. I simplified as much as possible. I made as much use as possible of TB’s ability to stretch,
squeeze, rotate and move each drawing so that “tweening” can take place – a huge timesaver in that one
drawing can be used many times in different shapes, positions and places and TB fills in between frames
mathematically and sort of magically. I did the left shoe and right shoes in the side view and then from the
front view and then had to “create” the change of position from side to front for both shoes – that didn’t
work too well but as it happens in real time so quickly I think I get away with it. And there is the problem
of one shoe being hidden by the other for parts of the movement.
So that’s where lots of time goes – drawing, repositioning, redrawing for each frame.
I knew that the laces would need to flop around and getting that right was a major chore - although they are
barely visible they had to be constantly in motion or it would have looked very wooden. That needed two
more layers and lots of changes, frame to frame.
With the original sound locked to the background greenscreen image at least my timing problems were
simplified and I only had to “foley” a few extra taps for the change of view and at the end where the music
wasn’t quite long enough. Getting a good single “tap” sound is another story for another day!.
Australian film & video