This week, we had a lot of stuff to do. First, we refilmed everything which was much faster this time around because we had a blueprint (our rough cut) to follow. We shot in the same locations with the same setup: a tripod and phone camera. Secondly, we had to cut all the footage together and figure out how to quickly chop out frames to create the stop-motion effect. After doing some research, we found a way to change the frame rate of the footage by using the "Posterize Time" effect on Premiere Pro and then also changing the frame rate of the sequence. We got the overall stop-motion effect that way, while also cutting out certain frames where were there a lot of motion blur to give it more of a stop-motion look. After editing scenes with the horns and eyes, I sent those scenes for Sarah to work on. She then worked on creating the drawings for scenes with horns and eyes while I worked on making more edits to the rest of the animation, exporting out frames where the lighting or coloring had changed drastically to color correct them in Lightroom, using a few frames as a baseline for color and lighting. After treating all the frames, I put them all back together in Premiere, exported them into a video, imported the video back into Premiere for color grading. After Sarah finished drawing some of the eyes and horns, she sent them to me as videos and I applied the same color grading effect to those videos as well. Nearing the due date, Sarah was struggling to finish all the drawings, so we decided to use point tracking to do most of the horn animation. It took a few tries to figure out how to use it, but after watching a few tutorials and messing up a few times, we got it work pretty well. As Sarah was finishing up the drawings and some more point tracking, I worked on the sound design, finding a lot of random sound effects off YouTube to create an overall eerie mood. For most of the animation, I had an idea of what sounds to use. However, there were a few movements that I needed to figure out sounds for, like pulling out the horns and the pulling the eyes and mouth. For pulling out the horns, I searched for "growing" sounds and found a few bow and arrow sounds, and I ended up using a sound of a bow string being pulled back. After piecing everything together, from Sarah's drawn and point-tracked footage and my point tracked footage, I applied all the same color grading to each piece of footage and exported it.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with what we created, though the process was quite frustrating. I definitely think we could have improved the overall look if we had actually done some part as actually frame by frame stop motion. Although it looks somewhat convincing, it doesn't really have the same feel as stop motion.