The Life and Life of Horace

Horace was commissioned by Sgrin, the Welsh Media Agency as part of their short film productions scheme. Along with Jason, I'd made a film called Second-hand Experience under the Screen Gems scheme a few years previously and it was great to see him progressing onto the next stage of his career. We were given a two week deadline to complete the work, which consisted of three areas of work:

Rotoscoping Horace to isolate him from the background and then make the background appear as if it was a hand-drawn cartoon. This was to show his detachment from the real world and his internal escape to a fantasy.
Rotoscoping the narrator, a nymph who glows a warm orance and is surrounded by a cloud of fireflies.
Adding extra CG detail, such as Horace's destruction of his 'cartoon' world at the end of the short, and tracking two images onto a newspape, including a very lengthy track in the final shot of the film.

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To accomplish the rotoscoping, I was aided by Ben Cawthorne, my housemate and colleague at Dinamo. We worked on two computers, hand rotoscoping each shot in After Effects before I added the eventual effects. It was difficult work, especially as we only had time to do it in the evenings and the last few days saw us working until 2.00am in order to deliver on time. Although we looked at various solutions, there was no easy way of rotoscoping the characters without doing it by hand. Further complicating some of these shots was the camera movement, although I didn't mind this as much because a static camera is very boring and would have detracted from the film.

Our first task was to design a method for rendering the cartoon backgrounds. This was done by sending every frame of the film through a custom Photoshop script that not only highlighted the edges but also removed any background detail. This made the backgrounds look painted with a pen outline, something that now (three years later) can be easily achieved with the toon plugin in After Effects but which was then unavailable (at least to those of us with shallow wallets.) It took a lot of tweaking to remove glitches and flickering from the lines and there is still an odd banding visible, but otherwise I'm really happy with the effect. Originally, the effect was much more pronounced but Jason reduced it after the first preview. The rotoscoped Horace was then placed back over the top.

The second task, making the nymph glow, was a similar process to Horace but instead of simply rotoscoping and placing her back over the top of the painted background, I added the extra glow element. This had to be a subtle effect because she would otherwise look too bright and lose any detail in her features. As a base, I added a general glow that spread out from her body and face. I then isolated the highlights and made them sparkle so that it seemed that she was creating the light all on her own. The effect was adjusted on a shot by shot basis to best suit her size and position in the scene.

The nymphs fireflies were added last and needed every moving plate tracked in 3D to make sure they move correctly with the camera. In some cases, this was straightforward but some shots, especially the one where they are walking down the road and the camera moves around them, it was very challenging and required tracking by hand. For that shot, I requested the entire take so that I had footage before and after the edit to work with. Two levels of glowing particles were created and separated by the rotoscoped outline so that it appears that the fireflies float around and behind her.

The final task was to create the scene in the park where Horace sucks in the cartoon world and blows out a leaf. This is my least favourite shot and suffers from a lack of time and rendering power on my home machine. It was made in 3D Studio Max and the particles were created from a high polygon plane textured with a frame from the footage. I had to learn how to make those particles pretty quickly and get them to swarm around the screen before disappearing into Horace's mouth. To be honest, the effect is a kludge and thankfully cuts away before the inadequacies of the particles are revealed! The single leaf that Horace blows away was created and animated in After Effects, and proved a lot easier to do!

The moving image on the paper in the last shot of the film had to be tracked on by hand. Annoyingly, the 3D tracker proved unable to get a strong lock, even when I thought it would be the easiest shot to do. What do I know! Instead, I took the 300 frame sequence and keyframe by keyframe corner tracked the movie onto the paper, rotoscoping around the actress playing the nymph as she passed in front of it. I think it took me about four hours in total!

All in all, I really enjoyed working on this project, however exhausting it may have been!

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