Michael and I continued cutting out the shadow puppets this week, mainly focusing on the first animated section in the classroom.
Dragon Puppet from the first section:
I decided to test out some layering on Adobe After Effects with the wolf walk cycle to see if the coloured backgrounds Martha had in mind were achievable digitally, as doing them practically (though more authentic) might create issues that would eat into a lot of time, e.g finding the right resources, distorting the puppets, making keying the backgrounds out when layering image sequences difficult.
I first keyed the background white of the wolf walk cycle out to isolate just the wolf silhouette. This took a bit of tweaking as photographing against the light box left a thin blue outline around the puppet that needed a separate colour key to remove. I then applied some effects to the silhouette to darken it and make it appear more like a shadow – the glow and gaussian blur dulled the edges of the puppet slightly to give the effect of a shadow being behind a translucent parchment screen, and the brightness and contrast adjustment darkened the separate parts of the puppet into one cohesive silhouette.
Linear colour keyed wolf still
Martha hadn’t specified a colour she wanted in the background of this scene yet so I tried quite a bright blue, just to see whether I could make it appear natural and to have the same physicality and tactility as the shadow puppet wolf, despite being digitally created. I applied two different glow effects to create a slightly dreamlike, otherworldly texture to the fill background, one of which you could control the radius of. This helped create a subtle vignette effect also seen in Lotte Reineger’s 1920s shadow puppets films, hopefully adding a sense of authenticity and handcraftedness to the digital test. I also applied an adjustment layer with a very slight film damage and flicker to the entire composition to remove some of the crispness and definition that comes with modern digital technology, aiming to replicate the handcraftedness in the reference Martha had given us.
A very light crumpled paper overlay was also added as Martha specified she’d like some of the texture over the top of the silhouette to give the allusion of a screen of parchment being in front of the puppet.
Here is the final product of the test: Wolf Puppet Test
I sent the test to Martha, who thought the colour came across naturally and liked the paper texture, but thought the flicker was a bit too much which I agree with in hindsight as I think it strays into a slightly tacky horror effect that doesn’t fit with the genre of Martha’s film. For a test however, this was very helpful in seeing whether desired effects were achievable digitally and what I would need to create them, as well as how long it would take to create them.
Later in the week, Martha decided taking the digital route with background colour and textures was the best idea as it allowed for more flexibility if elements needed changing and also in terms of resources and time.
