Epithema
- A horny excrescence upon the beak of birds -
Trying out rotoscoping on my video of a pigeon, part of Random Word Project.
This was a quick test of using the tracking feature in After Effects and Mocha. After the workshop last week, I really wanted to cement what I’d learnt with another gif/video. As it’s nearly the end of this project, I went for an extremely simple idea and test - of attaching a horn to a pigeon. So after recording the footage and making a simple horn in Flash (to utilise the vector image, to reduce any possible pixelation), I used the tracking feature. I struggled a bit, as the horn didn’t seem to want to align correctly. This was made harder as the area of the pigeon that it was set to track was really small, so the software had trouble maintaining the movement. However, after a bit of playing around it started to work.
In the end, I’ve really started to like the misalignment and sometimes clunky effect this gives the horn movement. It looks strange but this matches the idea of an appearing and disappearing horn. With more time I could have tried to correct the motion, but here, I think it works fine. A nice exercise for trying tracking out again. It’s definitely a skill I can carry forward and gives me a lot more flexibility when using live action footage.
