https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=068jGJh65Kw

I had worked with Tungsten Visuel before, but nothing as big as this project. The whole idea was to integrate drawings on most of the shots to achieve the illusion that the world around the actress would evolve according to what see was drawing on her tablet. This had to be done using only Adobe software.

Drawing animations

Animating the drawing was an easy task. The graphist Geneviève Gendron was a very nice and thoughtful person. I communicated with her a lot to make the workflow faster and more flexible and she was kind enough to split all her layers so I could animate them by color and brush type. She also recorded herself drawing so I could duplicate her style in the animations as much as possible. I then mostly used a combination of stroke effect and paint effect (as alpha matte) on After Effects to achieve the animations.

The tablet and painting on the wall was the hardest to achieve. Since the actress was asked on set to draw over the video of Geneviève she was not totally synced with the artist movement. we could also see the graphist cursor on the screen. I then rotoed the cursor and used a different sample of the actress’s hand that I animated using After Effects’ puppet tool to match the graphist movements.

Tracking and implementation

I encountered a lot of errors with the built in tracker and had to track a lot of elements manually. It turned out to be OK for most of the simpler shots but became complicated for the last one since I had to match two different slider speeds.

The implementation was also a little tricky because we had to keep the transparency and the color space of the Photoshop file and match it with the Sony sLog3. There is no easy way of doing this in After Effects. We chose to send all the FX in a rendered file wrapped in a 16bit MXF that contained the alpha channel. This allowed even more flexibility to the colorist since it allowed to grade the drawings and the original footage separately by keeping a nice premultiplied alpha channel.

In the end, the client was happy with the result and the drawings turned out to look very nice with the transparency and after color grading.