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Dailies 2 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/557efe02e4b0ff7f4a6d51c8/557f0103e4b085fc53df8b0a/1434387675480/ AD Goodies - All I want for Christmas... https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/557efe02e4b0ff7f4a6d51c8/557f052de4b0c6af003223e2/1434387797554/ AD Goodies - Dailies 1 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/557efe02e4b0ff7f4a6d51c8/557f0567e4b00367523e2f55/1434387842207/ AD Goodies - Pitch video http://mikecantor.net/freckle-making-of-orig daily 0.75 2012-11-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817911780-9YRBJ673EX1G225A9A8I/making_of_frames_01.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - De Plane Boss! De Plane! (0:22) TOP NEXT The opening shot of the video represents my first experiment with the primary technique I developed for "Freckle", which I call "Velcro Rotoscoping". The rotoscope was a machine used in the early days of animation that projected an image onto a glass plate for an artist to paint. By projecting one frame at a time of a film, the artist thus created the cells of an animation. Velcro rotoscoping uses the same principle: a projector throws an image onto a 36 x 27 grid of white velcro dots and I recreate that image using my luscious velcro pixels. Do this for a sequence of frames in a video: Voila -- Velcro Rotoscoping! The source material here is some stock footage of a 747 cruising through skies, to which I added a zoom in After Effects. As you can see, the velcro footage got some lovin' in AE as well. I keyed out the white color of the board, punched up the purples, and shifted the color of the plane into a golden hue to give it more contrast with the sky. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817911680-04GBMSRNU4LETFLL2WTU/making_of_frames_02.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Making Contact (0:32) PREV TOP NEXT The earth zoom-out was created before Freckle, and before I had the "velcro rotoscope" set-up with the projector throwing images onto the dot-board to guide placement of the dots. In fact, it was the 10 grueling weeks spent creating this five and a half second video, that convinced me that devising a reproducible and air-tight system with a projector was non-negotionable. Without an image thrown directly on to the board I went through many iterations of diagrams and charts to try to reproduce the source footage (which I will neither confirm nor deny is the opening sequence of the Jodi Foster vehicle "Contact"). I drew up elaborate schedules to track the behavior of various elements of the image (sun-ray spreading, lens flare spots, movement of the coast-line, etc) and calculate the number of dots of various colors that needed to be transitioned with each frame. Notice that when the sun comes up over the horizon, the entire color pallette of the image changes as I try to reproduce the glare of the sun-rise, and then recedes to yet a third color palette as the Earth is cast into darkness. This means that every dot is gradually replaced as the sphere is rotating... twice. Check out this Google doc to see the depth of this pre-projector craziness. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817911080-L2GUB14LV3M0NMGWU6RH/making_of_frames_03.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Maiden voyage of the dot-suit (0:41) PREV TOP NEXT Here we have our first experiment with the velcro chroma-key suit. The dots moving across the suit are the same dots used to represent the starry sky in the previous shot of dot-outer space. In the first version of the video I had the flickering dot-rendered space continue as the background behind Brandon. I wanted to give the impression that his body was just a distortion of the dot-space. However, the dot-suit on dot-background looked noisy and visually confusing so I went with the stock footage of space, which was fortuitous because the space footage became a recurring theme in the video. The hardest part of this shoot (besides profuse dot-suit sweating and a lazy optimism that the adhesive-backed dots would hold to the suit without the need for real epoxy) was getting the lip motions to work in stop motion. The guide in the video to the left was our tech to help mouth the words. It only kind of worked. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817914588-RPZATXR4QVMTXYWBUAEP/making_of_frames_04.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Amber Eckley From Texas (0:56) PREV TOP NEXT Hi Amber, my name is Mike -- nice to meet you. Thank you so much for agreeing to help me out with this video. I'm trying to think of a nice gentle way to ease you into the experience of working with me. I know, how about if you lie absolutely still for three hours on a green-screen on the floor in the back room of my studio while I glue beads to your face and chest. I promise this scenario doesn't conclude in a ransom note. And thus begun an amazing working relationship. Amber was unflinchly optimistic about every crazy set-up I put her through, always cheerful, and always willing to drop everything for a shoot. And she did it all for free. I will be forever grateful to the great Amber Eckley From Texas. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817914181-825ABXRJML2W26CUGKSK/making_of_frames_05.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Eye to Eye... To We! (1:18) PREV TOP NEXT The lyric in this sequence is "Eye to Eye we ride in the Beam. The constant she stops time for me". My idea here was to have Brandon and Amber spin on a turn table in stop motion for the first part of the line and then abruptly switch to live-action at "She tops time for me". For fifty frames we nudged the turn-table a fraction of a rotation, consulted our lip-sync guide so Brandon could get the mouth position right, and snapped a photo. Then we attached a rope to a hook on the turn-table, and the intrepid Nancy Campbell furiously ran around pulling in a circle while crouching to keep her body out of frame. When it came to rendering the footage in velcro, we accentuated the transition from stop-motion to live-action by switching from dotting the foreground (the figures) to dotting the background. Why have I suddenly gone from the pontificous "I" to "we"? After working alone on the video for about 6 months, I joined an incredible film-making collective in San Francisco called Scary Cow . The "Eye to Eye" sequences were the first shoots performed using my new volunteer crew from Scary Cow. It was an interesting experiment for me because I wasn't sure how critical my finely honed dot-matching skills were to the velcro rotoscoping endeavor. Would a bunch of velcro novices produce the same beautiful result? The answer was an emphatic yes. I decided on the color pallete beforehand and then assigned various sections of the image to each person, e.g. "You take Brandon's shirt: these are the eight varieties of blue dots to use." With a little instruction, my volunteer "velcro pushers" caught on quickly to tricks of the trade (for instance, tracing the trajectory of a few key features to give the impression of movement, like a big dark crease in the shirt or a highlight off of Amber's shoulder, rather than trying to match each pixel perfectly). Here some pics from the shoots: In the end, I went from sweating through about 6-8 frames a night alone in my cave to having a grand old time with a bunch of cool folks and knocking out 20-30 frames a night. The feedback I got after my first cut of the video was "More dots! Less everything else!" Joining Scary Cow enabled me to greatly expand my ambitions about how much footage I could render in velcro. There is no way "Freckle" would look like it does now without Scary Cow and my dedicated crew. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817913881-9LMZBOAUVPQFO6ZYZNI0/making_of_frames_06.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Amber Kaleidoscope (1:32) PREV TOP NEXT More dot suit fun! We only used a fraction of Amber dotting shown below in the final cut. The trippy kaleidoscope was created in After Effects by staggering 140 layers of the same composition at progressive rotations and scales. Rendering the whole section took about 48 hours on my iMac so I had to play around a lot with creating nested proxied sub-compositions so to come as close as possible to being able to "scrub" the animation while timing it to the score. Originally I tried to have the kaleidoscope kind of warbling with Brandon's voice, but in the end I decided that it wasn't improving on the slow methodical zoom into spinning Amber-land... and I got sick of repeated two-day renders. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817913381-DYW2ZPPN6UBY28KZO9RU/making_of_frames_07.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Take it to the Bridge! (1:54) PREV TOP NEXT For the instrumental bridge in Freckle, I dediced to indulge myself in some Hot Freestyle Action at the dot board. This is the only part of the video where you see just the dots on the board, straight no chaser (that is, I am not masking out the white board and compositing the dot footage with other stuff). The whole sequence was shot in about two weeks in a frantic run-up to the South By Southwest festival in March, where Brandon was a showcase artist. They wanted a video from him for their various promotional shenanigans and we were nowhere near finished with Freckle. I decided to try to at least get a rough cut completed through the bridge and to fill in the rest with teaser "making of" footage. You can see this early draft of Freckle here . The transition from the bridge to the time-lapse crowd footage ("Time Lapse!") was done using the projector, as usual, to match the dots to the first frame of Brandon in the white suit. I loved making the little crane-like machines that process the board into that image. Thanks to John Hight in my crew for suggesting that I interleave the first frame of Brandon with the last few frames of the dot sequence to help reinforce the transition. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817912581-Y9O5ARSSSDMI9Z1479VM/making_of_frames_08.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Heads in the Street (2:09) PREV TOP NEXT Brandon and I scouted a ton of spots in San Francisco before discovering this gem of a location at Pier 39. A network of pedestrian overpasses criss-cross over the heavily trafficked walkway you see in the video, creating excellent vantage points for a tripod. Who needs cranes? Brandon would stand stoically in his white tux ($25 courtesy of the Party Store in Alameda), start his fake guitar-strum, and then raise his hand to indicate his readiness. I would take a shot, raise my hand in response, and then he would take a step back and repeat. Every once in a while we would be stalled by a curious tourist demanding to know what Brandon was doing. A few assumed that it was some kind of performance art and tried to give him change. Upon spotting the camera, at least two sets of people put their arms around him and would not relent until I took the group snapshot (perhaps they thought we were selling them?). If you look closely at the frames here, many feature passers-by with their heads turned to oggle the wierd guy in the white tux. The lyric here is "Time Lapse! Heads in the street. Move and they stop! Move and they stop!" During "Move and they..." Brandon spins diagonally across the crowd. He then appears to spin in place while the crowd freezes on "Stop!" This was accomplished by shooting a sequence of Brandon spinning in one spot wherein we waited, between each tiny rotation, for a moment when the crowd was clear around him. This allowed me to easily cut Brandon (and his shadow) out of this sequence and place the spinning figure back into the empty spot of a still crowd shot. My only regret about the Pier 39 shoot is that we did it while I was still learning about exterior lighting and made the mistake of shooting it in noon-time sun. Hence the sort of flat blown-out light and the horrific shadows under the brim of Brandon's hat. Oh well, first (okay second) filmitis... https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817912381-5I3KA4ODA02LSBBNKY65/making_of_frames_09.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Hum of the Hive (2:18) PREV TOP NEXT The hive of "Hum of the Hive" was created by gluing down bugle beads (gotta love the arcane beading jargon!) in a hex shaped pattern, dripping yellow and brown wax on top of them, and then touching up the edges of the hexes with a white paint marker. The whole assembly was built in stop-motion under a light box. In the video, I reverse the stop-motion sequence so that the hive appears to disintegrate. In After Effects, I keyed out the blue paper and pen hex-lines, and put a blue sky behind it. At the end of the sequence, at the line "Filter the air" I animate the final few clusters of bugle beads to look like carbon chains flying off through the sky. Of course the other ingredient of this composite was a selection from about 50 takes of Brandon in his white suit against a green-screen singing "It's the hum of the hive!" in as many wierd ways as he could think of. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817912080-WCY48OA38I2XFUZQAPB5/making_of_frames_10.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Mitosis! (2:23) PREV TOP NEXT Hot Mitosis Action! This was a fun one. Here at Team Freckle we seek to educate as well as entertain. (image courtesy of Dr. Waynes Biology in 24 hours .) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817911980-PC9NDA7XBWYAJRBLV97F/making_of_frames_12.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Plant in the Seed (2:29) PREV TOP NEXT I cover the making of this sequence in detail in my first Hot Velcro Action blog post on the <a href "http://mikecantor.net/hot-velcro-action-blog/2012/1/21/velcro-rotoscoping.html" style="text-decoration: underline;" target="_blank"> Velcro Rotoscoping setup. The source footage is a time-lapse video of a blooming star-gazer lily. The first post-processing task with my velcro footage is usually to use a color key to try to subtract out the white board from the image, leaving just the dots. The dots can then be super-imposed on the original source footage, as you see in the video. With the velcro Lily, It was extremely difficult to define a color key that could distinguish the white board from the white dots that represented the flower. I ended up having to suck it up and manually define the mask by going through the sequence frame-by-frame in After Effects and painting circles in the alpha channel. It took me about 10 minutes per frame and I did it while sitting on the couch watching a Pats game in Boston with my dad. I wrote the the blog post referenced above largely in response to my many failed attempts, during commercial breaks, to explain to him what I was doing. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817911181-PVWY7CIKWRFOJH2B2L2F/making_of_frames_14.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - The Dotsuit Shake (2:43) PREV TOP NEXT The premise behind the dot-suit dancing experiment was simple: Put Brandon and Amber in green suits with pink dots against a purple background. Use color-keying to define separate masks for each of these three colors. Apply those masks to different random cool background sequences and recompose them to create the complete scene in multiple combinations: The background in velcro dot footage, the suits in a still shot of grass, the dots in a time-lapse of Magic Rocks growing in a wine glass (the pinkish white pattern). Or the background in a photo of black and white dot cutouts, the suits in grass, the dots in Magic rocks. Etc... In reality this was much harder than it seemed because my green-screen set-up and lighting was, to say the least, less than ideal. The color-keying only kind of worked and I ended up instead spending hours and hours with the After Effects Rotobrush tool more or less manually creating these masks. The whole endeavor took me approximately 2.6 PRS (Project Runway Seasons). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817914681-8J8QZVGWLH496UD9PR7W/making_of_frames_15.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Baby's First Year! (2:48) PREV TOP NEXT It was a Sunday afternoon and I was sitting around navel-gazing in my studio when I had an escalating series of art fantasies that went like this: I should just cover the walls of my studio with dots! I should have a lifetime running art project of making small circular pieces of art to cover the walls of my studio! I should make a stop-motion film of small circular pieces of art moving around the walls of my studio! OMG I should print out stills from Freckle, put them in circular picture frames and then film them in stop motion moving around the walls of my studio! OMG I could zoom into a still, set off the corresponding video starting from that still, zoom back out to the collection of picture frames, etc! OMG! OMG! That's how I'm going to do the outro of Freckle!!! I promptly hopped on my bike and rode to every thrift store within a 5 mile radius of my house, trolling for circular picture frames. However, fate intervened when I breathlessly uncovered two insanely perfect props. The first was "My First Year", a tin picture frame with twelve oval cut-outs meant to house photos of your precious poop-maker through the first months of its life. I took the frame home, coated it in gold leaf, measured out the ovals, and printed out a background with the twelve stills you see in the video. The second uber-prop I found that day was the coin-collecting folio that I turned into Amber's magic picnic book . https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817914281-93GAWKM75ZXY9ZK5NBB6/making_of_frames_16.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Amber's Magic Picnic Book (2:51) PREV TOP NEXT As I described in the previous "Making of" nugget, Amber's magic picnic book is one of two amazing props I found one sunday while thrift-store diving for circular dot-esque picture frames. If you look very closely at this scene in the video you will notice that under each little circular inset in the book is a number and the name of a president of these United States of America ("33: Harry S. Truman"). Yes, this wondrous treasure is a coin-collecting folio, designed for your friendly neighborhood numismatist to house her collection of some particular series of presidential coins. Coins that just happen to be of 1 and 3/8 inch diameter, exactly the size of my velcro dots. Each dot in the book is a frame from the video which I printed out on stock paper, punched into a circle and affixed to a velcro disc. The way this magic book of memories is supposed to works is that when Amber pulls a dot out of its inset, the corresponding video starts plays in the body of the book. When the dot is replaced, the book goes back to it's default setting of good old outerspace stock footage. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817913981-WA2E9WLHCMA3A80SSFBV/making_of_frames_17.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Tron Rings (2:59) PREV TOP NEXT The moniker I used to name all the footage associated with this shoot was "Tron Rings" because I wanted to create an effect reminiscent of the black light suits from Disney's original Tron . The effect was produced by spinning Amber and Brandon around on a turn-table in chroma-suits while I moved rings of dots up and down on their bodies. The whole shoot took about 6 hours. It was the first shoot in which I had the two of them together and Brandon was delighted by Amber's youthful energy as she blitzed us with questions meant to distract them both from the tedium of standing in place for hours: "If you could have any super-power what would it be? Any job? Favorite food? Greek myth? Sexual position?" Eventually, though the energy flagged and we resorted to playing episode after episode of the Colbert Report on my laptop while I spun and dotted them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817913280-AU2F56CRZ8RK47B9ASWK/making_of_frames_18.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Squid Masks (3:19) PREV TOP NEXT For the final set of dot shoots with my Freckle crew I wanted to do something fun, not a meticulous tracing of a projected image , and not a mentally taxing algorithm to follow. I decided to make pattern using just two colors of dots, black, and green, which I would then use to define masks for dissolves between pieces of footage in the finale of the video. Huh? I'll explain. At 3:14 in Freckle, we have this zoom-out to a big grid of Freckle-playing cells. You also see this swirling squid-like pattern of circles. The circles consitute a mask, revealing the opening frame of the next shot in the video (Brandon hovering through the air in stop-motion). This mask is defined by the green dots layed down on the dotboard (using color-keying in After Effects). The dot sequence is run in reverse: when the board gets to all green, Brandon is completely revealed. The dissolve is completed by using what is called a "Matte Choker" in AE to expand the borders of the mask until it dissapears. Another mask defined by the black dots is used to dissolve back in to the "grid" footage, and then the green-dot mask is used again to dissolve to the Amber "hover". https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817912680-XKLOHH8E2QA5BKI4W6YJ/making_of_frames_19.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Hovers! (3:23) PREV TOP NEXT These stop motion "hovers" are created just as you might think: Brandon is instructed to leap as high as he can into the air and bring his knees to his chest. I take a picture at the peak of his jump. Then he moves half a step forward and we repeat. Needless to say this was an exhausting day for our dynamic duo. High art meets calesthenics. I seem to remember that we kept trying to rotate the in-soles in Brandon's black shoes to avoid completely destroying his knees. Incidentally, I didn't come up with this technique, it is a stop-motion trope that I've seen in multiple places. For instance, check out the hilarious classic Tony vs. Paul. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1433817912480-7X2HQ2MDTDCFIKPPY6HL/making_of_frames_20.jpg The Making Of Freckle Orig - Anti-dot Burial PREV TOP Ever since I began this obessesion with velcro circles back in 2009, I have made it a point to keep the "negatives" -- the thousands of punched-out strips of different colored papers generated while creating the dots. They piled up in multiple trash bags at the back of my studio, waiting to be unleashed in some future crazy art project. In "Freckle" two lovers chase and encircle eachother across a dot universe. I thought it only fitting that the video end with the two of them finally united and still, buried in the negative space between the particles that had kept them adrift. Or something like that... http://mikecantor.net/new-gallery daily 0.75 2015-06-14 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/557ded30e4b0e197d12079f5/557dee5de4b071274fc3c0af/1434316386973/ vid gallery test https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/t/557dee69e4b03cb1c9239e6a/1434316386973/ vid gallery test https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/557ded30e4b0e197d12079f5/557dee01e4b0c0319fac22c2/1434316333393/ vid gallery test https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/557ded30e4b0e197d12079f5/557ded74e4b0c0319fac2012/1434316346226/ vid gallery test http://mikecantor.net/new-gallery-1 daily 0.75 2015-06-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1434402731424-GX90M6VU0G2VPO5I179C/AD-production-still_1.jpg AD Production Stills https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/557613b6e4b019b0586e52ba/1434402731424-GX90M6VU0G2VPO5I179C/AD-production-still_1.jpg AD Production 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